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Comment by gentleman11 | Hacker News Reader

I feel for the writers out there, but at the same time most articles I read are terrible. I hate them. It makes me emotional how much I hate them. I don't frequent these two sites, but that's partially because I've given up on reading articles by most publications. Truthfully, in many cases, I thought a lot of news articles were already ai-generated using much lower quality algorithms

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I don't know much about Gizmodo, but replacing Kotaku writers with AI would be a net gain for everyone.

That’s a pretty defeatist attitude.

Gizmodo has maintained their quality reasonably well over the years.

I agree that most (in a numerical sense) articles on the internet these days are blogspam, but that’s no reason to accelerate the elimination of journalists.

> Gizmodo has maintained their quality reasonably well over the years.

I disagree. I haven’t read an article on Gizmodo that hasn’t made me angry about how bad it is or how full of horse apples in maybe 10 years.

These are bullshit sites that people must only work for out if desperation. It’s unfortunate for writers but AI articles will probably be less bullshit than the current site.

agreed

> AI articles will probably be less bullshit than the current site.

I'm not so optimistic. Its all in the training. I'm expecting BSGpt that will be trained to produce exactly the kind of nonsense these sites produce and their consumers like.

I think AI content is terrible. But I think Gizmodo is worse. They’ve basically been doing manual AI content for years. A mix of blargh-speak, advertiser commissioned content, and just really bad and lazy authors who don’t have creative freedom to write.

I also don’t think consumers like the current content, but just end up there due to dark patterns and circular advertising. So the content doesn’t matter as all they do is trick people into “reading” enough to watch a pre roll or click a link or whatever they are monetizing.

Agreed with everything you said. But with AI, they will be able to remove the scaling problem - instead of 50 people writing 100 bs articles, there will be an LLM generating 1000 bs articles and the degrees of required bs + dark patterns + commissioned content injection etc can done at a much larger scale. Their core model is bs; they can't/won't change that - they will now just be able to do that at scale.

Good point, so it will be more profitable for Gizmodo as they’ll have much higher content levels.

But for me I can ignore a billion crap results the same as a thousand.

I’m expecting there will be some version of an “AI Long Tail” article soon that explains how the tail will get really long now. Although it would be bad if AI causes a fat tail where everything is the same and there’s no more long tail.

If — as Nick Bostrom and Elon Musk contend — we are more likely than not living in a simulation then ALL content is AI.

These kind of articles are what we get when writers are given impossible deadlines and targets to hit (multiple submissions per day in many cases), and incentives that favour clicks and engagement over actual imparting of information.

Even if you’re a good writer, you’re not doing your best work under those conditions.

There is plenty of good journalism these days, but it is increasingly difficult to find.

This was a problem long before AI.

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