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
Guess we now know why Nick from The Escapist was fired. They think GPT can do it better.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t see why people would even go to a site to read AI generated articles and be bombarded with ads.
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
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.
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.
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.
doesn’t the average american read at a 6th grade level or something?
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.
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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.