The Washington Post burns its own archive
Indignity Vol. 4, No. 216
LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA VIRGINIA DEP'T.
Artificial Intelligence Means You Can't Read the Newspaper Anymore
OVER THE WEEKEND I tried to look up something on the Washington Post website. I was writing about Pete Hegseth, the Fox News personality Donald Trump has named to be secretary of defense, so I wanted to see how the paper's coverage of Hegseth had played out over the past couple of weeks. "Hegseth" is a nice unusual name, sufficient for searching, so I typed that into the input box next to the little magnifying-glass and hit return.
What loaded next were some little animated boxes and that blur of not-really-text-shaped blobs that is already too familiar as the sign that somewhere, an "AI" system is draining an unholy amount of energy to generate an output. When the display resolved, the header, instead of saying something like "Washington Post Archive," said "Ask the Post AI." Below, text read:
This is an experiment. Answer is generated by AI from the published Washington Post articles provided here. Because AI can make mistakes, please verify the response by consulting these articles.
After that came an unreadably dull boilerplate summary of Pete Hegseth's situation, which I skipped over immediately because by now the AI systems have trained me to scroll past the machine-generated results. Below the computer-generated boilerplate were boxes linking to the specific Post stories that the AI had cannibalized, and below that was a service questionnaire asking "Was this answer useful? [SMILEY FACE] Yes [NUMB FACE] Unsure [FROWNY FACE] No." Below that, at last, was a list of stories.
The stories were in no particular order. Maybe there was a recency bias, like the one that's made Google nearly unusable for getting background information about current events, but mostly the chronology wasn't clear. Mixed in with the Hegseth articles, displayed in the same format, were the writer pages for some individual Post reporters, presumably the ones who'd been filing stories on the Hegseth beat. There was a "Load more results" button at the bottom, which brought up both more stories and more reporter pages, followed by a new "Load more results" button.
Had this gotten all the Post's Pete Hegseth coverage? Was there any way to tell? Down below the button was more explanatory text:
How Ask The Post AI works
In response to your question, this tool searches articles published by our newsroom since 2016 and ranks the results based on relevancy. We then use a large language model to write a response to answer your question. This tool may not always understand your question or be able to provide an answer. In some cases we will provide a pre-written answer. If you have questions about this tool, please see our FAQ and AI policy or contact customer care.
How the Ask The Post AI works, that is, is the machinery scans eight years' worth of the paper's 147-year history, tries to guess what stories have words related to the words in your query, strings together words from those stories with more guesswork, and then lists a sample of articles in its own chosen order. There's no way to rearrange them by date rather than by "relevancy," or to set a date range, or to do any other sorting or selection. The Post has replaced its computerized index with an even more computerized anti-index, an opaque barrier between the would-be reader and the news the Post has published.
There is no good way to work around it. Just now, I tried asking the Ask The Post AI "Show the Post's most recent coverage of Pete Hegseth in reverse chronological order." The AI spat out the following passage of text:
Here are the most recent articles about Pete Hegseth in reverse chronological order: December 04, 2024: Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary, insisted during a defiant media interview Wednesday that allegations against him of sexual misconduct, mismanagement and excessive drinking are lies and that he would “continue to fight” for confirmation. November 30, 2024: The Army veteran and one-time Fox News Channel host who could be the country’s next defense secretary has strong views on a decade of women serving in combat positions in the U.S. military — strong and negative.
Below that passage were boxes linking to three articles from December 4, November 30, and December 4 again. Below the boxes, in list format, were stories from December 9, December 4 (matching one of the stories above), and October 12, under the heading "3 results related to 'Show the Post's most recent coverage of Pete Hegseth in reverse chronological order'."
Five different stories, total. That's what you get if you ask the Washington Post's website to show you the Washington Post's ongoing coverage of the person who's been named to run the United States military. Or that's what I got the one time. When I did it again, I got four stories—the same three up top, but only the October 12 story below.
Here is the all-conquering generative AI revolution. Where there used to be a specific useful tool, there's now a generically useless thing that vaguely and incompetently mimics the general shape of the old tool. Everything you do on a computer is getting AI interventions grafted into the interface, to prevent you from accomplishing whatever it was you used to be able to accomplish. It's like the mass decision by carmakers to put as many controls as possible onto touchscreens, so drivers have to constantly take their eyes off the road to see where their finger is going on the flat glass. But at least the screens were cheaper than the physical knobs and buttons they eliminated. The purpose of the AI is to make things more expensive—namely, the valuations of the AI companies.
No one who cared about the purpose of the Washington Post or the purpose of the Washington Post archive would have ever allowed the Ask The Post AI to be deployed. But the world has allowed the management of knowledge to be taken over by ignoramuses, and now the ignoramuses have built ignoramus machines in their own image, manufacturing non-knowledge on a scale previously unimaginable.
Down in the small-print columns at the very bottom of the webpage, under "Get The Post," eighth on the list, between "Print Special Editions Store" and "Today's Paper," is another option: "Print Archives (Subscribers Only)." If you find that and click on it, it will take you to the ProQuest database, where—if you've paid for a Washington Post subscription—you'll be allowed to search for published articles, or at least the text of articles, minus their images and removed from the Post layout. The only way to see what the Washington Post has published is to leave the Washington Post.
SIDE PIECES DEP'T.
Tom Scocca
I WAS TRYING to look up the Washington Post's coverage of Pete Hegseth to write my column for Defector, which was about the incoherence, if not futility, of political scandal coverage in late 2024:
Nobody understands how scandals are supposed to work anymore. A scandal is a social ritual, and American political society has ruptured. The idea that Pete Hegseth was faltering was based on a series of assumptions about reputation, public opinion, and their consequences: that Hegseth would be embarrassed by an escalating series of stories about his alleged misdeeds and failures; that Trump would be embarrassed to stand by Hegseth as those stories accumulated; that the Senate would be ashamed to vote to confirm Hegseth; that the American people wouldn't tolerate such a situation.
So far, the first two of those assumptions have been stretched beyond their presumed limits, the third appears to be on its way there, and the fourth seems moot. The only public the Trump movement cares about is the public wrapped up inside the movement's own messaging machine, who are so far being treated to defenses of Hegseth and attacks on his potential opposition. The situation can't be intolerable as long as no one agrees what the situation even is.
The watchdog only bites what the watchdog can get its teeth into. The press still knows how to destroy the president of Harvard; the president of Harvard still exists in the same established social order. Chris Rufo, the controversy-manufacturing entrepreneur, knows the words and gestures that would send the press after the president of Harvard. No one knows how to send the press after Chris Rufo.
Tom Scocca
AND FOR FLAMING Hydra, I wrote about the strangely unworrisome sensation of having a notorious killer at large in the city, and about the other killing the press doesn't seem to care about:
For all that the extended crime scene crisscrossed my daily routine, it was about one person and only the one person; the eight million other people in the city were like the bystander in the shooting video, whom the killer completely ignored.
A day and a half after the shooting, in Lower Manhattan, a 17-year-old boy named Yeremi Colino was stabbed to death and an 18-year-old with him was wounded. Three people reportedly asked the teens, who were migrants, if they spoke English, then attacked them. The police have made no arrests and haven’t released any surveillance footage of the suspected killers. As of Monday afternoon, four days later, the New York Times still had not published a word about it.
WEATHER REVIEWS
New York City, December 8, 2024
★★★★ The morning sky was mottled blue and white. The hoodie needed to be worked free from the parka sleeves and layered under the lightweight utility jacket again. Before the clock struck 4, the sun had already yielded to the buildings and a half-moon was up, its color looking intermediate between those of the pink-tinted clouds and a clear white contrail high above. A hawk perched puffy and pale high up in a tree, closer to the light but still not in it. Rose petals lay scattered on the unpaved way up the side of the Great Hill, looking at first like over-saturated fallen leaves. Through the tangled bare branches, far off below the Park, an enchanted glow was draped across the good and bad buildings indiscriminately, with here and there a section of glass molten with reflected sunset. A young man alone on a bench puffed on a fat, largely consumed cigar. The day deserved more time, but there was work indoors to do.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
HERE IS TODAY'S Indignity Morning Podcast.
Tom Scocca
Click on this box to find the Indignity Morning Podcast archive.
TOM SCOCCA
ADVICE DEP'T.
GOT SOMETHING YOU need to justify to yourself, or to the world at large? Other columnists are here to judge you, but The Sophist is here to tell you why you’re right. Direct your questions to The Sophist, at indignity@indignity.net, and get the answers you want.
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of a sandwich selected from Fruit Recipes: A Manual of the Food Values of Fruits and Nine Hundred Different Ways of Using Them, by Riley M. Fletcher Berry, published in 1919 and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
GRAPE SANDWICHES
Seed and slice thin, skinned, white grapes; mix with chopped nuts and apples, binding together with French dressing and spread on buttered rounds of thin-sliced white bread.
If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net.
