Owner of Destructoid, The Escapist, Siliconera, and others Fires Writers and Hires for "AI Editor" to Churn Out Hundreds of Articles Per Week
futurism.com
According to their website, Publications owned by GAMURS Group include:
Destructoid
The Escapist
Siliconera
Twinfinite
Dot Esports
Upcomer
Gamepur
Prima Games
PC Invasion
Attack of the Fanboy
Touch, Tap, Play
Pro Game Guides
Gamer Journalist
Operation Sports
GameSkinny
This is fucking gross. There’s no one who thinks people will read the mass shit they pump out.
A lot of sites like these are already just click farms with “articles” consisting of a headline and a couple poorly-researched sentences. Switching to AI probably won’t significantly change the quality of what they’re churning out.
Right. That’s why searching for anything on the internet SUCKS these days. The results are all just filler bullshit.
Something to keep in mind is that these companies aren't concerned with total profit or revenue or anything like that - it's all about the percentage. I suspect in the short term, these AI-articles will look very profitable. Networking effects, consumer habits, and SEO will carry the day for a time.
But what always screws these MBA types is the inability to recognize the specific natures of their business and the second order effects. Not all costs are representable on a spread-sheet.
Basically, the second order to me really boils down to this: AI generated content isn't really a 'brand'. Good writing shops tend to build a following with their writers and expectations with their editors. The writing, investigative, and editorial bent of a house is essentially what makes a shop. See The Economist and The New Yorker as examples. In other places, a lot of niche shops are selling personality as much as product with youtube, podcasts, and others.
this means there is no real 'value add' someone like an AI shop can provide. You are throwing yourselves down the hole of becoming a pure commodity, and as every business major knows, being a commodity sucks. Short term profitable, but literally no one cares about where a mass produced nail comes from and its a race to the bottom of price.
So, as time goes on, with the barrier for entry being incredibly low, every bill and joe who fancies themselves an SEO wizard has no reason to not jump in, so your competition rises and your ability to charge some value for (ads?) drops a lot. But that's the tip of the iceberg. Many of the companies that would occupy this brandless, commodity-filling space are way better positioned to make a run at it than the GAMURS Groups of the world. Microsoft's Bing chat and (probably soon to follow Bard) will whip your ass in the long-game. Why search Bing to get an AI article from the Escapist when Bing will do it for me? I really doubt anything churned out by an AI with some edits will be that much better per convenience.
This whole could easily collapse in on itself. Like a lot of people in the AI space, I'm interested to watch what happens when AI begins to consume and be built on its own content.
Yep. This is why I've been a paying subscriber to Ars Technica for over a decade. You're exactly correct. Ditto with NPR.
The enshitification of the internet continues. How can we offer our content, but without having to pay anyone for it and at a much higher rate of delivery? By not giving a fuck about the quality anymore and not having any real competition so people have no choice. Except people always have a choice. We can walk away.
I don't see why people would even go to a site to read AI generated articles and be bombarded with ads. I could just ask an AI to write an article for me? Just cut out the middle man at that point.
Doesn't have to be voluntary on the user's part. Maybe they clicked a link on Google? Or maybe a site they've been reading for ages suddenly switches to "AI editors" and it's never really announced to the users in a clear way
Yep. Someone will make an app to generate click bait for you on the fly.
The sites don't mention the AI authorship, so you go there to read an article, likely one you found linked elsewhere, only to be baffled by the ramblings.
Considering how many blogs are just AI generated garbage now, it doesn’t surprise me that the big players are looking to automate their articles.
The issue is that AI can’t really create… it just remakes what it already knows and has seen before. No hot takes. No new ideas. Just whatever has been done before.
Hopefully this isn’t the new way everything goes…
Also, Chat GPT at least still writes at the level of a somewhat talented ninth grader. Its prose is stilted, and the way it structures essays and stories is super formulaic.
It's absolutely not at the level it can replace a talented human writer yet. (I have no doubt that day is coming, probably sooner than we think, but it's not here yet.)
So publishers making the switch will see the quality of their content drop, and with it the number of clicks / revenue they get. Enough to offset the salaries of all the writers they fired? Probably depends on the publication. For clickbait farms, probably not, but the higher quality the readers are used to the more the publishers stand to lose.
It doesn’t commit to anything either, its writing is absolutely full of weasel words and a detached perspective.
doesn't the average american read at a 6th grade level or something?
Writing is harder than reading. For example, compare the writing in a children's book to something written by a child
54% (130 million) Americans read BELOW the equivalent of a 6th grade level.
A lot of the reason for this is chronic underfunding of K-12 ESL programs in southern states and California.
I've been to Destructoid. They don't hire talented human writers. They barely hire human writers.
I'm just waiting until these models get completely unraveled by training on output. The more people use generative AI to make stuff online, the more useless the internet is as a data source.
Noted. I'm officially starting a "not reading your crap" list.
Yep, time to just blackhole their DNS entries.
Cnet, too. They crapped out some misinformation ridden ai generated articles a while ago.
Gotta say, all those sites sound like ai generated titles already
So now I know which sites to ignore completely from now on.
Probably wouldn’t hurt to blacklist links from sites known to produce only AI generated articles.
I want a ublock origin list for this.
Amen. I’ve already removed the ones listed above from my RSS reader (that I had subscribed to).
I'm pretty sure I'm already ignoring all these sites.
... until someone will use an AI to generate a whole publication... or a whole set of them... or an entire publisher... or an entire holding owning the publisher...
I've just seen Black Mirror S06E01 yesterday night and it did hit deep
I had no idea Black Mirror was back, thank you for this comment. Now I just have to find the time to watch it :P
Content farms have been polluting the web for years, to the point that search engines are near totally unreliable. But this new wave of AI-powered content farms, and even worse, AI-driven content from once respected and trustworthy orgs, is going to make things exponentially worse
Agree 💯 What's wild is that it's been taught that you have to use 'established' publications for reliable and accurate information. AI (in)famously can just make things up, and it's going to be at major sites
I know game journalists are memed on, but this is really disappointing. AI will eventually unravel and crap out because it's regurgitating AI content.
Will it eventually be AIs at the marketing firm telling the execs that their ads are successful because the AIs on the other side are 'reading' it for new training data on how to better optimize viewer attention span? Just two Ad companies paying each other back and forth?
I can't wait until The Escapist articles are all "Zelda Zelda Zelda Zelda ZeldaZeldaZeldaZeldaZeldaZeldaZelda Zelda Zelda Zelda Zelda Zelda"
I'm least worried about The Escapist, as the editor-in-chief for the past few years Nick Caldera is running it with integrity. It is the only game news site I am happy to pay a subscription to.
How does that matter if the owners just fired all the writers and replaced them with an AI? I see little to no integrity at a publication owned by some big group calling shots like this. These are Nick's bosses, so uhhh... he either listens or quits.
Yeah if they run it that brutally, it's going to go bad.
But usually there is a lot of difference between how sub-companies are treated both based on how they are currently doing and how strong-headed their management is.
Any service looking to replace human writers with ai is positioning itself for failure once generative ai becomes more mainstream. Once your average Joe can ask a native phone app for anything they want, the Only value of written text will be the human element.
This is actually an incredibly good point. This applies to writing, visual arts, music, programming...
Yo, I don't mean to get all John Connor or anything, but we need to put a stop to and legislate against AI. Full stop.
We already see how it's being misused.
What would you legislate here? The publication clearly doesn't care about quality and paying some people to fill shitty, already pre programmed templates and using something like chatGPT seems like the same style of crap.
They were definitely not a safe source of labor.
Also, I'd caution against reactive takes of "legislation" when the politicians who can legislate usually don't understand the technologies and are simply trying to bundle stuff in for their lobbyist (who funds them) benefit. The same types who "want to ban encryption" or other myopic takes.
Stronger rights and guarantees around imbalances of power (not specifically related to tech either) would work much better than just reacting to an AI scare.
Having to put a disclaimer if an article is written using AI (like they have to do for advertorial) would be a good step.
I keep seeing this but I don't get it. Can you give me the outline of a proposed law that you would enact?
I wonder if this will end as poorly as that eating disorder hotline that did the same thing.
At least this is less likely to hurt or kill people.
Excuse me..... what???
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/eating-disorder-helpline-chatbot-disabled/
It’s already been reversed because of how badly it did.
They didn't reverse it in the sense that they went back to human operators. They got rid of the AI by getting rid of the service altogether by the looks of things.
Sometimes no service is better than bad service?
In this case, yes.
And of course they fired the workers after they voted to unionize, what else we would expect?
One person to edit 250 AI articles per week? I'd be very surprised if they found them.
“Editor”
Read 50 short articles each day and approve any that aren’t blatantly offensive.
Just use another AI to edit the first AI's articles!
It's AI all the way down!
Lol, this might be enough to make Yahtzee from Zero Punctuation quit The Escapist; if that happens, they're likely done soon after.
I hope he does, it would be insane
I just don't see ChatGPT being capable enough quite yet. These articles are going to be low quality, written in the same voice, and filled with factual errors. Not to mention released at a volume that nobody will bother to keep up with. Seems like self destruction on their part.
An AI writer is always going to be trash. AI can't experience anything, only remix preexisting content. So it'll always be a regurgitation of what others have posted. But if we keep cutting out humans, then it'll eventually be nothing content on repeat.
Of course it’ll be trash. Quality isn’t the goal, just bulk with the aim of getting maybe fewer views per article but pumping out so so many that it’s more views, or rather ad impressions, overall with much lower cost.
Problem is it’s shortsighted. Once those sources quickly get a reputation for trash quality folk will learn not to bother clicking through to those sources.
There is also always a chance that it's simply going to be wrong, ML cannot differentiate what is the truth or not. We see it happen with easy mistakes that people wouldn't make and it's going to be even worse when they get used for something more nuanced or complex.
Guess we now know why Nick from The Escapist was fired. They think GPT can do it better.
Sure, flush your websites reputation down the toilet. Good luck with that.
This may be a little tangential, but does anyone know of any game news sites with RSS feeds that have talented writers working for them? Some of the sites I've followed for years have been regurgitating Twitter opinions more and more, and it makes finding thoughtful (or just plain informative) articles far more difficult.
If you like MMOs and other multiplayer games, https://massivelyop.com/ is very good. Talented writers funded by reader donations.
I've been following that publication for a while, actually, and I agree. They're a great team.
I’ve used RockPaperShotgun for a long time https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/
Aye, long term subscriber myself, they do good work. Although I'd have probably linked the 'everything, newest first' page:
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/latest
This juxtaposed with all the teachers failing students for using generative AI tells you a lot about the world we live in.
good luck with that, I think after a bit of time us gaming community needs our own domain white/blacklist just so we can filter our search result to the more writer/contributor friendly sites.
Just about every area of interest already needs one. Every topic I've wondered about in the past several years and looked for with a search engine has horrible articles that have been SEOed to death, and it is going to get worse with AI being able to generate the bulk of the article now.
We as humans are already sensationalizing for clicks. I can’t imagine what content is going to look like even in the near future with AI at the reigns.
The solution is the same as with the current shitty clickbait of today, ignore it.
If they automate shovelling useless crap (which they've already done quite a bit without the likes of chatgpt) then it's on the user to say "I'm not just gonna consume your crap, I'll go elsewhere with my views, which are your success metric, in aggregate"
These generative models are only capable of regurgitation. They're fed content, and they come up with statistical distributions of words and phraes in their training data to sample. But they're still just chopping up other people's copyrighted work and gluing it together.
This gets into generic "you can't copyright individual words" territory when dealing with very common topics, but when you get into niche topics, the training data gets sparse, and the distributions stop allowing for creating something new.
And they can't extrapolate beyond their data. All models break down once you leave the boundaries of the data.
So, any articles generated by these things about something new are either going to be trained on too small a data set to avoid lawsuits, or just be incredibly factually wrong.
And if they're publishing reviews of new games that are full of factual errors, they could get sued for defamation.
This is just stupidly risky on their part.
"250 articles a week..." So they are just transitioning to creating spam? Never read any of those sites but focusing on output just sounds like spam. #filtered #squelch
It’s pure clickbait farming. The article doesn’t need to be any good as long as the headline gets a click and just enough seconds of attention for the ad space to be profitable. Zero journalistic integrity, just gaming the numbers >:-(
I used to love the escapist can't say I've gone there much since these guys took over
It used to be a near-daily visit for me, but I haven't gone there in years and years.
Destructoid was so good for so long. Between this and the fact that they started to bug me about my ad blocker, it's time for me to stop giving them views.
Really sad to see them fall so far. I remember back when they seemed like a beacon of light and hope of good communities and journalists etc. now to see them turn into just a spam garbage site is so sad.
To be honest, I'm intrigued to see just how badly this will go. I expect some open job positions soon
Ugh, not The Escapist. I mean you see a lot of AI written articles nowadays so it will only ramp up, but it's still bad.
So... these sites are all just random text generators now? What's the point?
Cheaper to produce clickbaity articles. Most of these websites are already just trash "articles" made for clicks
They just want to capture the person coming in off of a search platform looking for something in a game. It's all about the clicks.
I was curious about some stuff in Elden Ring, and every search I did had shitty, obviously SE optimized bullshit for at least the first 10-15 results. Well fuck that, I'll just read the also bullshit SE optimized wiki because I can at least keep the adblockers on and the scripts off and wade through the crap.
More help from companies on letting me know the websites to stay away from. This isn't the first time DToid did stupid crap. Back on Justin.tv, maybe they had converted to Twitch already, they had a BUNCH of streamers that were ruling the platform, then they said that their streamers would have to review and give positive reviews of sponsored games. All the streamers left the group and Dtoid lost a TON of traction and Twitch exploded from Justin.TV.
And I just unsubscribed from the Escapist and Destructoid RSS feeds. What a bummer. Thanks for the heads up!
Eh, not as big of a deal as people think. You've probably already read lots of AI generated content without even realising it
I often do notice it, although I sometimes wonder if people might be this stupid in real life or not.
Fair, but how about the stuff you didn't notice? You'd never know. College professors are being tricked everyday.
Kinda hard to prove a negative, right?
How would you know if you didn't notice? Could be dozens but could just as well be 0.
It was inevitable that someone would try to use AI like this to make certain jobs obsolete. Sites with content like this will manipulate Google's already garbage algorithms to make it a self-consuming snake.
The only way out is to continue to encourage thoughtful discussions from thoughtful articles. AI could certainly help with information, but perspective and insight is an inherently human trait that will tune people out.
.
I hope the new EU legislation regarding AI also covers this type of things.
Someone correct me if I am wrong but ai editor implies the writer will remain and they're using ai ton "fix" the article and write the headline. Isn't that one of the main responsibilities of an editor?
I think it's the other way round. AI writes, the human editor touches things up a little, and together they poop out hundreds of low effort articles a week.