This post first appeared on aud.life

Freddie deBoer has an article in the latest Full Stop Quarterly about Google’s Deep Dream and the failures of tech journalism to correctly explain the project.

It’s just the latest example of tech journalism’s deficiencies, but it’s a fairly significant one, I’d argue, as it involves a development in artificial intelligence. After all, there’s been a steady drumbeat of reports predicting that “robots are coming to take our jobs.” Yet there’s strikingly little understanding of what AI really can and cannot do. Instead there’s this belief in the stories about emerging technologies – almost a blind faith, really – that computers can do anything. And whether that’s accurate or not (um, it’s not), this is a narrative with profound implications for social behaviors, expectations, and institutions.

But tech journalism can’t help us figure any of this out; it offers us very little guidance towards a critical understanding of “how tech works” or “what it means.” As deBoer writes,

With click-begging headlines, useless metaphors, vague discussion of essential information, and the general ambient woowoo that chokes our tech media, stories about Deep Dream have demonstrated the capacity for aggregation-style internet journalism to mislead.

Most tech journalism has become the PR wing of the tech industry and the champions of techno-solutionism.

In lambasting coverage of Deep Dream, deBoer notes (almost in passing) that “A friend of mine who’s a science journalist tells me that she was informed by Google that they would be doing no interviews about the project. An explanatory blog post from the Google research team is useful, though it (understandably) fails to reveal some of the specifics about the program.” With no PR briefing and with little to copy-and-paste from the company blog post, it’s not that surprising that tech writers turned to metaphorical language to fill in the story, to meet the requisite word count. Tech writers don’t necessarily have backgrounds in tech or science, and if they don’t understand Deep Dream or artificial neural networks themselves, they can’t really explain it to their readers. (Of course, they could turn to academic researchers for insight, but the tech industry has pushed another narrative there, that there’s no innovation happening at universities. So yeah. Why ask a professor to comment?! What would they know?!)

Even when companies do provide PR briefings, it hardly means that the coverage is any better. Rarely are assertions made by marketers or CEOs challenged; rarely are other sources outside a company interviewed.

In part, it’s because tech journalism is access journalism (as opposed to, say, investigative journalism). Tech journalists are often given the news – they’re pitched the stories or they’re emailed the press releases. If another publication has a story first, it’s simply re-written, perhaps with someone’s Tweet tacked on for “analysis.” “Churnalism.” The tech blogs, a significant (and venture-backed) part of the tech industry, churn out tens of stories a day; that means their writers frequently pen multiple articles a day – there’s no time for fact-checking; there’s little incentive to do so.

There’s a strong disincentive to be critical. That could mean loss of access. (deBoer cites Gizmodo’s questionable coverage of Deep Dream, but it’s worth remembering what happened back in 2010 when that particular tech blog reported on the next iPhone. As in: this fall’s Apple press event was the first one Gizmodo was invited to in almost 6 years.) It’s not just about loss of access for a publication: critical coverage could also dampen the opportunity to move on from tech blogger to more lucrative jobs like marketing executive (a fairly common career path) or venture capitalist.

It’s not just Deep Dream coverage. Tech journalism serves to drive sales and drive investment for the industry; it serves to drive ad revenue for the publications themselves. And it is utterly shot-through with bullshit. deBoer observes,

TechCrunch’s Jay Samit claims that driving your car will be illegal by 2030, a statement of such grandiose, shit-eating delusion I have to admire it. Look beyond how self-impressed and confident Samit is, and you find a flagrant underestimation of the technological, infrastructural, economic, and legal challenges to self-driving cars, and, in extension, of human agency, of the random chance and luck that drive history, of the stunning political risks that any politicians would endure in enacting such a law, and of the fact that people really, really love their cars. No one can blame Samit for existing in a context where he is rewarded for being ridiculous rather than shamed.

Replace “self-driving cars” with “MOOCs” or “adaptive learning” – all of which tap into the faulty understanding of artificial intelligence and human versus machine learning – and you can see my day-to-day frustration with ed-tech journalism.

I’m often reminded of a story about Mike Arrington’s move from tech blogger to venture capitalist by then-tech editor for The Atlantic Alexis Madrigal – a move that even other tech writers at the time thought was pretty damn unethical. Madrigal argues that

The generally accepted sense of journalistic ethics says you shouldn’t have financial conflicts of interest and that this is not negotiable at the individual level. Journalism ethics reside in publications and more broadly within the idea of the fourth estate.

But the specific ethical principles of journalism were only true for certain types of publications, largely newspapers and magazines aka the mainstream media (MSM). Now, we’ve got a whole bunch of new types of publications with readerships rivaling the MSM but that are something different altogether.

Many websites are functioning largely as trade magazines that occasionally commit acts of journalism. (emphasis added)

“What has to happen to our online economy to stop creating the incentives that make bad journalism like this happen?” asks deBoer. But what if the two – the tech industry and journalism – are simply utterly at odds?

Just when we need good tech journalism (and ed-tech journalism) the most – journalism that is rigorous, informed, critical, and ethical that can help us understand how (and for whom) technologies work – we find that the tech industry has chipped away at the media industry, undermining its economics and its ethics in the process. Instead we're left with trade magazines, that can only retell the magical, dreamy promises that the tech industry has whispered to them.