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Journalists convinced a AI Vending Machine Things to give them free stuff like a PS5
(www.techeblog.com)
this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2025
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Technology
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The vending machine from cyberpunk was pretty cool but this seems like its cognitively challenged ancestor lol.
I'm getting really tired of AI everything. So far AI hasn't seemed to make my life any easier or better. I have to try and over analyze everything I see now which isn't fun. But yeah. Wish it would actually do something for me instead of make some billionaires richer.
Honestly, I found value in asking an LLM to paraphrase press releases I was rewriting. It just saved me from accidentally plagiarizing. It was pretty grueling, as I quickly learned that feeding in a full story yields wildly inappropriate results, so I reverted to a graf at a time. Within that scope, one can check against errors; asking it to paraphrase entire DOE releases was worse than an abject failure.
It's a tool. You aren't using a hammer for a situation that calls for a screwdriver. People are being stupid about this basic understanding.
That word “accidentally” is doing a LOT of work for you here… 😉
It was my first reporting job. Yeah, at 44. And short of a few interviews, I was just rewriting shit.
I've been an editor for decades and have had to deal with plagiarism (thankfully, nothing too significant), so as a guardrail, it made sense. Editors approach writing with a far more critical eye than a recent J-school grad.