Real Life Beef: Bridget vs Essence Magazine – Listeners demand the truth about that weird ‘Vila Davis’ postazine

A few weeks ago in our news roundup we talked about a weird social post from Essence magazine on Viola Davis’s incredible outfit at the Cannes Film Festival. Not only was her name spelled wrong, but the language just felt off, and Bridget speculated that it seemed like it was written by AI. Fast forward a few weeks, and Essence reached out to Bridget about it on Instagram! But their response was confusing, at first they admitted to being “busted” and it seemed all in good fun, UNTIL they accused her of spreading misinformation. So was it written by AI or not? Bridget explains the reasons she still thinks it was, what this says about the future role of AI in media, and why AAVE (African American Vernacular English) might be the Achilles heel of generative language models.

See a screenshot of the original post through this public Patreon link (and while you’re there, sign up for more bonus ad-free content): https://www.patreon.com/posts/84517863

Check out Bridget’s critically acclaimed podcast “Beef”, all about epic competitions: https://ncpodcasts.com/beef

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.