Comedian Jerry Seinfeld on Sunday gave the commencement address at Duke University—a ceremony that was dominated by students walking out in support of Palestine.

Oh, wait. No, it wasn’t. But you’d be forgiven for having thought so, as a huge portion of the media coverage bafflingly put that protest front and center, despite that it was a blip on the event’s radar.

“Duke students walk out to protest Jerry Seinfeld’s commencement speech in latest grad disruption,” reads a USA Today headline. “Dozens walk out of Jerry Seinfeld speech at Duke commencement in protest of his support for Israel,” reports The Hill. “Duke University students walk out on Jerry Seinfeld’s commencement speech, chant ‘free Palestine,'” writes Fox News. “Duke students walk out of Jerry Seinfeld graduation speech in Gaza protest,” says The Guardian.

I could go on. But I’ll bookend the list with an article that, whether it meant to or not, made the case for why the demonstration wasn’t really a story at all: “About 30 students walk out on Jerry Seinfeld at Duke commencement,” notes Politico.

Thirty students out of the approximately 7,000 graduates and a crowd estimated to be composed of around 20,000 in total. Assuming those numbers are basically correct, that is 0.43 percent of students and 0.15 percent of the audience. Put differently, roughly 99.6 percent of students and 99.8 of the crowd watched Seinfeld’s address, which went on undisturbed after a brief period of chanting from the protesters. But it is very likely that many news consumers walked away with the polar opposite impression after consuming the press reports.

The out-of-touch Seinfeld coverage wouldn’t necessarily merit a mention if it were an anomaly. The problem: It isn’t. It has become fairly standard practice in the press to take voices on the fringe and shove them to the center of the conversation without contextualizing where they came from. Journalists are incentivized to find engaging angles, and fringe characters tend to be interesting. The impulse is understandable. But it creates a distorted picture of reality and comes at the expense of the truth. And journalists should foremost be invested in conveying the truth.

There are many such examples. But in keeping with the protest paradigm, I am particularly reminded of the phenomenon when reporters show up to cover controversial, hot-button demonstrations only to find that there are more journalists in attendance than actual protesters. That’s a pretty good clue that the media, perhaps subconsciously, is looking to create a story that isn’t really there.

As was the case at Duke. If anything, the demonstration should have been a footnote in the coverage, a line or two. Instead, it was portrayed as the main course. The press has shown a particularly insatiable appetite for stories on Israel-Palestine protests on college campuses; the division sells. Some of those demonstrations have certainly been newsworthy. This one wasn’t. Taken as a whole, the coverage unwittingly reenacted an iconic GIF, excerpted from the satire Arrested Development. Except it wasn’t supposed to be funny. “There are dozens of us,” character Tobias Fünke screams, after being outed as a never-nude. “DOZENS!”

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Seemingly overnight, artificial intelligence went from a far-future science fiction technology to a real thing that is supposedly on the verge of ushering in utopia and/or killing the human race. Lost in the shuffle of this discourse is serious discussion of what AI technology can actually do and what real-world effects it is having.

Explaining actual AI products is the core of Timothy B. Lee’s excellent Substack newsletter Understanding AI. Lee, a journalist (and occasional Reason contributor), refreshingly covers AI like a normal newsworthy subject. His articles include a nice range of original reporting on the companies and nonprofits producing AI, service journalism on how ChatGPT compares to Gemini, even-handed analysis of the legal and regulatory questions AI has inevitably provoked, and explainer articles on what even is a large language model.

The biggest takeaway is that, for all the boosterism and doomerism, AI will be a normal-ish technology that will have normal-ish impacts on the world. One of Lee’s best entries is a deep dive into how AI has affected one of the industries where it already predominates: language translation. Turns out that prices for translation have fallen and companies consume more translation services. That’s an unambiguous win for consumers.

The labor effects are more mixed. Some translators are specializing in more complex legal and medical translations the machines can’t quite nail (and where mistakes create huge liabilities). Nonspecialized translators are either using AI to boost their productivity or dropping out of the industry.

Love AI or hate it, falling prices, rising consumption, and increased specialization sounds like the normal process of technological advancement under free-ish markets.

The post Review: <i>Understanding AI</i> Helps Separate the Sci From the Fi appeared first on Reason.com.