As is possibly known, i”ve been spreading/sharing and commenting on Classics and Archaeology on the internet for more than a couple of decades and have long promoted assorted internet venues as essential for outreach purposes. For me, the two formats I became comfortable with are my Explorator newsletter and this blog..Both seem to me to be useful and unfortunately both were impacted by a couple of health issues the effects of which i have been contending with: Multiple Sclerosis and a stroke. Because of these, I am pretty much ‘bedridden’ and my day is regularly interrupted by visits os Personal Support Workers who do various tasks and transfer me from bed to wheelchair every four hours or so. As can hopefully be imagined, it’s not s scenario which lends itself easily to conventional blogging and/or newsletter production.
And so, I’ve had to adapt and create new routines. I think I have my Explorator production working pretty well and have long been trying to .’reboot’ this blog into something more useful. I had long envisioned presenting cumulative news coverage (i.e. with links to all the coverage of a particular find or event) in the hopes of presenting the ‘full’picture (if possible). I was thinking of point form summary followed by links., Just when I was thinking this, however, AI in various forms burst onto the scene and made me rethink bcause a lot of AI news items seem to begin with a point form summary and I genuinely feared I’d be accused of simply using AI myself. even though there are other signs something might be the product of AI (e.g. no author mentioned or something vague like ‘staff’, and a prose piece that seems to be ‘five paragraph essay’ format, usually with excessive use of headings which seem like modified question prompts).
Over the month of December it seemed like AI pieces were everywhere and what struck me as a tsunami of bot/AI driven ad farm type sites were filling my email box.. Perusing some of these i noticed another apparently common feature: the inline link citation of a news source. But what was clear was the source more often thann ot seemed to be just some random high circulation news source, and not necessarily a good one.
In the midst of this I had a eureka moment and realized this was where training in Classics fits into the world of AI news reporting..From the beginning of my training in Classics citation of sources was drilled into me. But simple citation wasn’t enough; the quality of those sources matters (I still remember a first year footnote comment criticizing (rightly) my use of Niebuhr as a source). but how does one judge news sources these days?
The answer, of course, was to establish a tier list. I first came across the concept of a tier list in my Yugioh Duellinks life where assorted sites (e.g. Duel links Meta) and duellists ranked assorted decks from a high of tier 0 (which Ive never seeen) a low of tier three or so . Then tier lists seemed to be showing up everywhere, especially in sports situations. And so it seemed like a useful exercisie to come up with a tier list for news items. This is what I came up with:
As can hopefully be seen among the small type and a few typos, the tiers are arranged primarily in terms of proximity to original sources and academic qualifications of the news correspondent.. I suggest this is something that AI hasn’t caught onto yet and i”m not sure it will for quite a while. And so I’ll soon be doing my cumulative bloggage which will incorporate these tiers in source citation. Stay tuned …
rogueclassicism 