Gizmodo and Kotaku Staff Furious After Owner Announces Move to AI Content

thejml@lemm.ee to Technology@beehaw.org – 23 points – Gizmodo and Kotaku Staff Furious After Owner Announces Move to AI Content
futurism.com

G/O Media, a major online media company that runs publications including Gizmodo, Kotaku, Quartz, Jezebel, and Deadspin, has announced that it will begin a "modest test" of AI content on its sites.

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The trial will include "producing just a handful of stories for most of our sites that are basically built around lists and data," Brown wrote. "These features aren't replacing work currently being done by writers and editors, and we hope that over time if we get these forms of content right and produced at scale, AI will, via search and promotion, help us grow our audience."

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Lets be real, these two sites specifically have read like they where written by AI for years now.

This is just going to get worse and worse. Corporations are going to continue to do everything they can to increase profits, and that means getting rid of human employees and replacing them (regardless of how effectively) with AI.

We are going to end up with a ton of people out of work, and zero safety net. Instead of the utopian AI future possibility where everyone can live and enjoy fulfilling lives because they don't need to work anymore, we end up with a massive population of people who can't afford a roof over their head because they were laid off and replaced with AI.

The working class needs to wake the fuck up and unify against the cancer of late stage capitalism.

All these AIs are going to produce is incoherent, poorly written, unresearched puff pieces abaut topic-adjacent garbage. In other words, we won't even be able to tell when the switch happens.

What all these trend chasing CEOs fail to grasp about ChatGPT is that the Neural Network is trained to return what looks like like a human written answer, but it is NOT, IN ANY CASE, GOING TO RETURN INFORMATION. If you ask ChatGPT to write an essay with sources, ChatGPT is going to write a somewhat coherent essay with what looks like sources, but it's going to be a crapshot if the sources are even real, because you asked for an essay with sources, not an essay USING any given source. Anyways, I'm going to heat some popcorn and wait for the inevitable fake articles and the associated debacle.

ChatGPT is an engineering marvel in that it has understood the semantics of language. However, it has absolutely no idea what it is talking about beyond generating the next token in a string of what sounds like natural language. I wish more people would understand this nuance.

It's actually perfect for the current attention-span deficit generation

I know there are already people working on creating AI filters, to filter out spam articles and other AI-created content.

I'd pay for that, it'll be the new adblocker. Fuck any company that does this.

I know there are already people working on creating AI filters, to filter out spam articles and other AI-created content.

These will probably (ironically) be largely labeled by AI. As in, you get an AI to detect AI text and content generation and flag those websites as likely AI generated, with some kind of scaling probability index. That said, I think you could use AI to enhance human writing and that's fine. Maybe write something on your own and then have an AI restructure it or reword things for clarity, fixing grammar mistakes and other things. But full on "write me an article on [insert random thing here]" is where shit gets tedious.

As someone working on LLM-based stuff, this is a terrible idea with current models and techniques unless they have a dedicated team of human editors to make sure the AI doesn't go off the rails, to say nothing of the cruelty of firing people to save maybe a few hundred thousand dollars with a substantial drop in quality. They can be very smart with proper prompting, but are also inconsistent and require a lot of handholding for anything requiring executive function or deliberation (like... writing an article meant to make a point). It might be possible with current models, but the field is way too new and techniques too crude to make this work without a few million dollars in R&D, at which point it'll probably be completely wasted when new developments come out nearly every week anyway.

Also wait, wtf are they going to do for game reviews? RL can barely complete Minecraft (which is an astonishing development, but it's so bleeding edge it might just cut to the bone). Even if they got some ultra-high-tech multimodal multi-model AI to play a game and review it, it would need to be an artificial person (AGI + autonomy) to even approximate human sensibilities and preferences.

but the field is way too new and techniques too crude to make this work without a few million dollars in R&D

I think AI is evolving so rapidly that by the time they get anywhere with this on Gizmodo the hand holding might not be nearly as necessary.

I doubt we will even notice the quality drop. Those sites have been pumping out pure trash for years.

Gaming press has been in downward spiral for quite sometime, so this is expected. Even before and without AI replacing them, there have been quite a number of staff cuts recent years, and they have been employing underpaid freelancers for a long time (I remember IGN boasting about paying freelancers above market price, but it is still barely enough for living).

Eventually these companies with AI generated articles will also disappear, not only because the AI is trained on clickbaity data, but also the current trend is people getting their previews / reviews from (sponsored 🤢) youtubers, twitch streamers, or worse tiktokers (how do you fit a review in 30 seconds video?)

And IIRC Jeff Gerstmann mentioned in his podcast that there are some who get into gaming press, as a stepping stone to gaming industry itself, so maybe they will get a job there? I mean many of the older gaming journalists are either taking rotational turn occupying senior positions in IGN, Gamespot, Polygon, Kotaku, or just straight up work for game companies as creative director or PR. So far it seems to work out not so bad for them, except for those in junior / freelancer positions.

Thankfully investigative journalism and long form insight writings are still untouched by AI shenanigans. Beilingcat and ICIJ still writing great stuff. But I have no idea how long it'd last.

Why do I feel like I stepped into r/KotakuinAction‽ This is shitty, no matter who it happens too. And EVERY news label has junk this day and age. The vitriol for this publication seems way more than necessary.

So let me make sure I understand this: Bad writers writing bad articles for bad websites to be replaced by bad AI writing bad articles on bad websites?

Long story short, nothing of value is being lost.

In a world where arguably the second most advanced LLM on the planet (either gpt3.5 or Bing's openai implementation) is completely free to use, why would I want to read anything on your website that wasn't researched by a human?

I wish I could I could sear this question into every CEOs brain.

I feel like AI would be better put to replace CEOs than Frontline workers lol. Get rid of your most expensive asset and improve efficiency.

Unfortunately the primary job of the CEO these days is more or less investor relations and relationship management between the C-staff. Can't automate that quite yet.

Can't automate any of the other jobs they are trying AI on yet either, but it's not stopping them.

Or at least middle Management. Though, it would require better reporting/time tracking/statistics to do so. Something easily gamed.

Eh, you can improve reporting, time usage, and statistics all you want. It won't help people stop making stupid short-sighted decisions. If it isn't middle management, it'll be the people controlling the AI's which replace them.

CEO: "AI, give me a plan to improve profits by at least 10% in the next quarter."

AI: "<insert plan>. Note: enacting this plan will cause talent attrition and there is a 70% chance of -50% revenue over the following 5 years."

CEO: "Sounds great, I'm retiring next year!"

The people up top have plenty information on how to run a long-term successful business, but still choose to make illogical decisions which screw them over the long term. Changing the source of data to an AI just means that the CEO can ignore any feedback or metrics which don't agree with their internal model and incentive structure.

Maybe it'll reveal that many websites doesn't want to give interesting news to its audience but only want them to watch ads to have more money.