Is Ireland's fake tan use problematic?

But the IT ran with it because they want to create a narrative that this is representative of the majority of the left.

They want the majority of the left thinking about race and social justice issues at every turn.

Every aspect of our day to day lives has to be disected and analysed so that in the end there has to be has to be a perpetrator and a victim.

they deleted their article on it even though they spoke to a real person who wrote a similar article years ago https://www.newstalk.com/news/irish-womens-fake-tan-obsession-reinforces-self-hate-1464720

not majorly, but the same way in some African/Arabic countries they use whitening creams

It's hilarious how it's always the other way around, the grass is always greener and all that...

I remember when I moved to Egypt, going around with a big pale Irish head on me and never got so many compliments in my life. Telling me my white skin was beautiful and like the moon... in Ireland we assume we look sick/ghostly/awful :V

I don't use fake tan anymore, maybe a tiny bit of tanning cream for a glow, but yes I've realised that constant dark patchy look is absolutely terrible, and it's sooo normal in Ireland for girls to have dark brown patchy hands and neck 'oh that must be her fake tan'

Also going in the gulag: anyone who takes comments like that that literally.

This AI craic may be an actual blessing in disguise. It will probably get to a stage really soon where AI may not only take over online journalism but basically all online everything. But people are people, and judging by this furore, the vast majority of real people don't like the idea of it. That could mean the death of online discourse and personal interaction for good. Maybe that's the point of this.

I didn't read the article.

At a glance I decided it wasn't for me, imagine that.

@Mullaghteelin

Because it's a load of old bollocks, that's why.

The vast, VAST, majority of people couldn't give a tinker's cuss about this nonsense. It's only a certain type that gets their knickers in a twist about this kind of rubbish and ends up pulling the guts out of themselves over nothing as if it's the end of the fucking world.

Everyone else reads something like this, rolls their eyes, and moves on to something more important.

Call it all you want. Knock yourself out.

But few people will actually give a fuck.

As for "upset", you're barking up the wrong tree. Just because there's some terse language being used doesn't mean someone is "upset". 😉

Do you not see the irony in this post though?

Think about what you have just written and ask yourself what an article like that might be designed to do and whether that design has worked on you. Here you are saying "every aspect of our day to day lives has to be dissected and analysed so that in the end there has to be a perpetrator and a victim".

Well, where did you get that idea from? Is that coming from people you encounter in your day to day life? Are the ordinary people you meet from day to day, who we can assume that a significant proportion of are moderate socially left people, telling you this? Or is it coming from what you consume through media and social media?

Go back to the early pages of this thread and people were making the leap comparing the sentiments in this article with communism etc. These articles are designed to lure outraged, 'woke this woke that' reactions.

Most of the people who got taken in by this article aren't the alt right. They are just gullible idiots with a penchant for a bit of outrage news porn in their lives.

New story? Shame that nobody told the IT management and its editor. He even had to send an e-mail to subscribers apologising about the failure in the IT's editorial processes and quality.

The credibility of the IT has been damaged and the story got national and international coverage. It has sparked debate on the effect of AI on various professions and industries and the IT now has the reputation of being hoaxed with a partially AI generated article. This "new story" about trolling the "alt-right", an import from toxic US culture war politics, to appeal to the permanently offended who would never subscribe to the newspaper and in doing so sacrifice the credibility of the IT doesn't make commercial sense, does it?

One thought will be going through the minds of newspaper publishers: how many opinionators and entry-level journalists can be replaced with relatively simple Generative AI?

Regards...jmcc

Choose the right input phrases and get the desired output. It works with humans too. Those who need to be perpetually offended, regardless of political affiliation, are actually dopamine addicts. Being offended gives them a high. The 'likes' and approval heighten the experience. This dopamine addiction drives Social Media and a lot of other "addictive" services and products. Opinion journalism is the easiest target for this kind of automation because those who read it are already primed for a response. Otherwise they would ignore it an move on to the next article in the section that appeals to their mindset.

This Generative AI isn't exactly Intelligent or sentient. It just has a much larger set of input data so that it can appear to be intelligence. It would not produce any great newspaper writers as such but would take their work and emulate it.

The use of press releases as content is a hidden side of newspapers of which most readers are unaware. The real danger is that with the widespread availability of the source press releases, the work of many journalists can be identified as similarly derivative. At its most basic, the same press release text will show up with the usual phrases like "x told [publication name]" with just a by-line and a few sentences changed. The technology sections of newspapers were notorious for this kind of thing with technology journalists who hadn't a clue about Technology or the business of Technology recycling the same stuff. Articles based on press releases would appear on US or UK publications and then they'd be picked up and slightly repackaged without any added insight or commentary in other publications. Some of the wire services (services that provide articles to newspapers so that the newspapers don't have to have fulltime journalists in different countries) already use elements of AI in production. AI-aided translation can be seen on some of the RTE website articles from other broadcasters.

Real journalism of the type that involves getting out and talking to people and following up leads is difficult and it is also expensive for publications. Press release recycling is cheaper. And now AI generated content is even more so. In the 1990s, newspapers decided to shift from the old news-focused model towards opinion. Then the World Wide Web came along. It wasn't until the mid-2000s and the rise of Social Media that things started to go badly wrong for newspapers. They had been chasing the advertising from the DotCOM bubble towards the end of the 1990s but that burst in 2000.

Then the newspapers started chasing the advertising revenue from the property bubble. The IT spent around 52 million Euro on the myhome .ie portal at the peak of the bubble. That burst too. In 2011, the IT was selling over 100K print copies a day. By 2019, it was selling around 54K copies a day. It stopped using ABC to audit its circulation by 2020 and in 2020, Covid happened.

Digital subscriptions, for most newspapers, are not replacing lost print sales. Take a close look at how newspapers present their digital subscriptions as "averages" and steer clear of mentioning the durations of the subscriptions or the tiers. Ireland is a very small market. The active readership of newspapers is even smaller again.

In the late 1990s, contextual advertising started to appear. It matched the online advertising to the content of the web page. In 2003, Google Adsense appeared and took this to a whole new level. It also destroyed the traditional advertising model for newspapers where advertisers would pay for an advert in the print edition and never know how successful it was in terms of sales. With Google's Pay Per Click model for Adsense, the advertiser only paid when someone clicked on the PPC ad. It completely changed online advertising and was arguably an earlier and non-obvious use of AI. Now, the algorithms used by the PPC companies learn from the inputs and past activity of users and serve them advertising based on this and the context of the webpage they are viewing.

Newspapers have been on the edge of a financial cliff for years. Apart from specifically local stories, much of the national and international news is available from competing publications. Opinionation is a major part of the business model of most newspapers today because it is cheap, creates outrage and encourages advertising. Most people don't read these pieces to agree with the authors. They want to be outraged. (Some publishers, at this stage are probably hoping that Trump will be reelected in the US in 2024.) The ease with which AI can generate content might be the saviour for some of them but many will fail over the next few years and AI will be a factor in which survive.

Regards...jmcc

Opinions in a section of the paper / website labelled "Opinion"? Whatever next?