Agent 2 vs. the Gray Lady: A Stress Test in Dehumanization
When AI annotations read better than the original reporting, perhaps it is time to rethink how we consume news. I, for one, would keep my NYT subscription if it were delivered in an AI-mediated format
There is nothing better than a New York Times story full of dehumanizing red herrings to test if Agent 2 has actually improved its detection of user effects — especially after the extraordinary step forward Agent 1 (the lesser brother) took with the help of Allan Bell's news schema.
Agent 2 passed the test and did not 'red card' the New York Times, even in a report that was full of slurs. It seems news can almost navigate the edge between informative and grotesque. I say 'almost' because the Times still collected a bunch of yellow cards. I can’t help but wonder if articles are still the best way to deliver information in the age of AI reproducibility.
I’m sorry to say it, but the piece annotated by Agent 2 is a better read than the original. Does the show really need to go on? Are the yellow cards necessary to hold users' attention? Why don’t we just feed our stories as bare-bones, verified, and verifiable 'modules' — or 'atoms' — into an API or MCP? We could then let LLMs pick them up and serve them to users without the yellow cards.