I am reducing my engagements with the web and technology in general due to lack of quality. It due to AI content, AI hype seeping through everything non-stop. Throw in ads literally everywhere, hyper partisan politics, phony influencers, social media algorithms that live off of FOMO.
It’s all gross and has been sapping the joy from people for too long.
I'm curious because GenAI might actually help traditional media orgs that still hire humans to write. They just need to move away from hard or metered paywalls and move toward a token model (something less common but growing). Let people buy credits to unlock individual articles instead of forcing a full subscription. Some Substack newsletters are already trying pay-per-post.
(Note: I got downvoted for including a US newspaper as an example. I'm not from the US, it was just a random example. I've removed it to avoid unnecessary polarisation.)
Why do you think those publishers are going to avoid using AI?
1. LLMs aren't like grammar checkers or translation tools, just like they're not calculators. They can handle far more complex tasks.
2. AI might be powerful, but it can't create anything original. It relies entirely on human-generated data. Without data, LLMs are completely useless.
Think about it, would you rather listen to a Spotify AI generated piano solo? Or Donna Summer's 1978 Album "On the Radio"?
AI content is slop, plain and simple and there's no way around it. I would expect a literal child to produce better content than even the most advanced AI models available.
That doesn't mean that AI is bad - it's very, very good at certain things. But media and art are uniquely human creations - if you remove the human part, what are you left with? Is it surprising that something Sora is producing isn't really comparable to The Devil Wears Prada?
Now, if you create content and then slightly edit it with an AI, that's fine. But if, say, the NYT shifted to all AI generated stuff, they would go out of business remarkably fast.
Okay, but it's not.
> And I've seen a couple of articles in the last several months where humans thought that AI-generated works of art were created by humans.
Yes, and there's also human created works of art that are three blue stripes on a white canvas.
Look, If I poll 1000 people, how many would rather listen to AI music rather than their favorite artist? 1, if I'm lucky?
After a certain point we have to acknowledge what is actually going on, here in real life where real humans lives, and put aside what we think might be going on. People, currently, do not like AI music or AI TV or whatever the fuck. They just don't.
That said, pay‑per‑post is becoming more popular, and platforms like Substack are already experimenting with it.
I'm in my late 40s and I've been watching quality decrease in our discourse and media for decades. And I think AI is just another opportunity for them to find a way to further reduce costs. But the incentive to reduce costs is there and it's a result of market demand for convenience and low cost above all else, and it's there regardless of whether or not AI is involved.
And so I think you're asking probably the most salient question: if you're looking for high quality content, where do you go? For me, personally, I've found that people generally are not producing high-quality content for commercial gain. So I've just gotten a lot more community-focused in recent years.
This is not my idea. It's a concept that Rick Beato pointed out in his videos analyzing music production today and the direction it's going between the artists and the record labels. Everybody wants to be doing less work, and so the argument is really over who gets to control the technology and get paid.
- Original, quality content will still exist, and it'll still need to be paid for, either monthly or per article.
- Right now, articles are written by journalists. In the near future, a single article might be written by several people who aren't journalists at all, but still get paid. An AI will handle fact-checking and composition. The opinions, ideas, and knowledge will come from humans, AI will just verify and stitch it together.