OVER THE WEEKEND I tried to look up something on the Washington Post website. I was writing about Pete Hegseth, the Fox News personality Donald Trump

The Washington Post burns its own archive

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2024-12-11 23:30:04

OVER THE WEEKEND I tried to look up something on the Washington Post website. I was writing about Pete Hegseth, the Fox News personality Donald Trump has named to be secretary of defense, so I wanted to see how the paper's coverage of Hegseth had played out over the past couple of weeks. "Hegseth" is a nice unusual name, sufficient for searching, so I typed that into the input box next to the little magnifying-glass and hit return. 

What loaded next were some little animated boxes and that blur of not-really-text-shaped blobs that is already too familiar as the sign that somewhere, an "AI" system is draining an unholy amount of energy to generate an output. When the display resolved, the header, instead of saying something like "Washington Post Archive," said "Ask the Post AI." Below, text read: 

After that came an unreadably dull boilerplate summary of Pete Hegseth's situation, which I skipped over immediately because by now the AI systems have trained me to scroll past the machine-generated results. Below the computer-generated boilerplate were boxes linking to the specific Post stories that the AI had cannibalized, and below that was a service questionnaire asking "Was this answer useful? [SMILEY FACE] Yes [NUMB FACE] Unsure [FROWNY FACE] No." Below that, at last, was a list of stories.

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