For The Pudding, Russell Samora and Michelle Pera-McGhee gave generative AI a serious try to see how much effort it takes and how good the results are. There was output. It wasn’t the best. However:

It’s a bit like comparing a woodworker’s table to an IKEA table. The artisans put a tremendous amount of time and effort into their high-quality pieces, while IKEA makes things quickly and cheaply, and most people probably can’t tell the difference (or don’t care). That’s a bit sad for us artisans. With AI, we can expect to see an increase in superficially appealing, low-quality content. But that doesn’t mean there’s no place for craftsmanship. We still find meaning in the custom, in getting all the little things right, and in creating things that feel like there’s a real person on the other end of the spectrum. And we can only hope that others will do the same.

As they say, this is the worst of what generative AI will be. It will only get better and making graphs will only get easier. But analysis, story, and the finer details that fit a dataset perfectly are much harder to replicate because the process is more fluid.

In the future, we need to focus our energy on the part of the process that makes data less cold and mechanical.

Keywords: Pudding, storytelling