Aloha State Daily Reporter Mike Brestovansky alerted me to this bit of online AI weirdness. He had been researching his recent article on Kaukonahua Ranch and along the way, watched the nearly three-and-a-half hour long YouTube video of the Nov. 5 Honolulu City Council meeting where a lot of people spoke up about the ranch's permit to get redeveloped as an agritourism attraction.
He messaged me: "Weird question: what do the YouTube captions say around 2:43:58?"
So I looked. Then I had other staffers look, from their own computers. I had my wife watch from home. Everyone saw the same thing:
As a woman is testifying, the closed captioning reads:
"Don't let Hawaiian Kam Napier fool you."
Except that isn't what she said. What she actually said was, "Don't let the Hawaiian names fool you."
Here's the video:
This is ... really weird.
And it's obviously an AI hallucination.
What I think has happened is that YouTube and its parent company, Google, have been scraping local media to train their generative AI, including such AI as automated closed-captioning algorithms.
I've been publishing locally for 30 years, so my name is on a lot of local reporting, though never on this particular subject. For whatever reason, the speech-to-text algorithm was stumped by what she said, fished around in its box of spare words and stuck my name into the captioning.
So, a couple of things:
One, don't trust AI. In my past job at Pacific Business News, I'd written a few columns about early disasters where generative AI such as ChatGPT invented criminal histories for real people who'd never done anything wrong. Locally, Hawai‘i lawyers have been getting in trouble for using AI to research legal briefs, only to have it hallucinate cases that don't exist.
I routinely see "AI overviews" at the top of Google search results that are flat-out incorrect.
All of humanity is being used as guinea pigs for this software and the immediate result has been that everything, everywhere, seems worse than it used to be.
Two, this issue of content scraping is a big problem for media companies such as ASD. We spend time and money researching stories to tell you what you need to know, then the AI companies hoover up that work and regurgitate it, depriving the media sites of the page views they need to sell advertising.
Instead, Google gets the clicks. These tech companies are grazing their AI sheep on our media ranch lands, in other words, eating our grass.
This metaphor comes straight from an episode of "1923" I watched the other night, one of the series in the "Yellowstone" universe. The cattle ranchers in that episode were not confused about the offense and their solution involved hanging some sheep herders from trees. OK, it's the 21st century now, the content ranches are virtual and we've got WiFi and laptops and AI and all that fancy crap, but the principle is same:
Do not take what you do not own.
And yet, if you want irony, I just searched Google for "media companies sue ai for content scraping." Top result is ... an AI overview, lifted from news media.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go find out what kind of trouble "Hawaiian Kam Napier" is getting into. The guy could be anywhere.
Don't let him fool you!
A. Kam Napier is editor in chief of Aloha State Daily. His opinions in Pipikaula Corner are his own and not reflective of the ASD team. He can be reached at kam@alohastatedaily.com.
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A. Kam Napier can be reached at kam@alohastatedaily.com.
