It ain't about the prompts

This is not the end of professional editing in media texts, and the beginning of the end of professional editing in media texts is damn near old enough to vote, so it isn't that either. But it is a quantifiable data point in the study of how and where value is assigned to professional routines.

Your brow might furrow beneath the green eyeshade at several points in the text above (drawn from the day's liveblog, the salience of which is another indicator). "Signalling" or "signaling"? They're equally correct, so if you did what the style manual says, fine (hope you looked first). Hyphenating "-ly" adverbs? If that's the rule, a tip of the hat to you.

But -- because editors should always have at least one brain cell in the gutter -- those may not have been the first to catch your attention. "Diarrhoea" is a correct spelling, but not on my, and CNN's, side of the ocean. A link at the top of the story indicates that the writer is based in London, suggesting that CNN hasn't learned from the utterly dagenham story that called Carolina-Duke a "local derby" when a UK writer was loosed upon the game.

There's more to style than spelling choices. Courtesy titles? That's actually two questions: first reference and second reference. (And in the long history of how news language normalizes being a straight white Christian dude in a big northeastern city, they're especially interesting.) The style manual might indeed have a rule for which professions -- or, in the old days, which genders -- get the title the second time they appear. The source here also has the "Dr." on first reference, which might help, depending on what sort of doctors are allowed in. Your dentist might grind her teeth, or your low-vision specialist might roll her eyes, or the guy interpreting galvanic skin response in a repeated-measures ANOVA on fear appeals in anti-tobacco ads might give you an extra jolt over it,* but there's probably a rule for that too. In AP style, the "doctor" category is fairly broad (yes, yes, no, respectively), but that calls for another look-up: Can we find out which sort of degree Dr. Davis has?

Short answer, yes. Longer answer: Yes, but that isn't how he spells his family name. Dele is fine, and the degree is an MD, but D-A-V-I-E-S. And that's well beyond a style question. Where it fits on the scale  of zero to "pay someone a living wage to keep it out of the paper" is a different matter. For jobs, like editing, that don't create content -- jobs that paint the parts of the car you don't see -- the presumption of added value no longer holds in the way we proclaimed two decades ago. So today's effort is another indicator of where a reasonably high-status media outlet is drawing the line on what's tolerable in the end product.

I bring that up because you too may be having Those Conversations: Where are the jobs, and why aren't you just teaching more AI? In case you missed it, enjoy this gem from the Times last week: 

An article on April 15 about the success that Mark Carney, the Liberal prime minister of Canada, has had in building cross-party alliances was updated after The Times learned that a remark attributed to Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative leader, was in fact an A.I.-generated summary of his views about Canadian politics that A.I. rendered as a quotation. The reporter should have checked the accuracy of what the A.I. tool returned. The article now accurately quotes from a speech delivered by Mr. Poilievre in April. He said, "My personal opinion is that when a member of Parliament goes back on the word they made to their constituents and switches parties, constituents should be able to petition to throw them out and have a byelection. That would put the people back in charge of our democracy rather than having dirty backroom Liberal deals by Mark Carney determine our destiny." He did not refer to politicians who changed allegiances as turncoats in that speech.

Can we teach people how to write prompts for the plagiarism machine? Probably. But depending on your tolerance for public embarrassment, it'll be healthier in the long run to teach people how and where to be skeptical, and what to do about it -- particularly when it comes to using the plagiarism machine's output. Google AI will happily tell you that Dagenham is three stops before Barking, which manages to (a) be completely true and (b) miss the point entirely: being dagenham depends on how far past Barking the subject is, not on the distance between Barking and Dagenham.**

I'd like to think the humans are going to win in the long run, but we're going to need some clearer signals.

* Not how galvanic skin response is done, but I couldn't resist.
** Next one who says "About three lengths of a fool" has to sing "Heaven Seemed So Near."