Technology

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.

so many of the replies to this post are so embarrassing lol. just because you can't tell the difference between good and bad writing doesn't mean that real writers should be replaced by bots that literally produce a facsimile of written content, as opposed to content with a point, which an LLM can't actually do.

like you think you're looking at bad writing, but when the robots start churning out shit articles you'll realize that you'd rather have a human than this nonsense

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Rabbits

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.

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.

This both ironic and unfortunate.

https://gizmodo.com/study-junk-news-sites-ad-systems-ai-generated-content-1850578259

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.

It's really frustrating that they don't specify what the AI will be trained on. Will it be just copying the work already done by actual journalists here? Is it scraping from other sites? If they're going to be doing this at any scale, they need to be transparent about the source material to avoid plagiarism

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.

It's like they actively want the internet to become a shittier place, as long as it makes money. The usual. I really hope people don't want to read this crap.

I feel for the journalists this is affecting, but I find the shock to be either disingenuous or a sign they haven't been paying attention to their own industry.

It really is a race-to-the-bottom on journalistic quality. I suppose it was inevitable that the rush to be "first to post" would be automated.

Though I wonder if this spawns a demand for in-depth, researched articles, or if YouTube personalities already fill that gap.

I honestly don't think people will be able to tell the difference. I cannot even count the amount of times I've searched for the solution to a PC issues I'm having only to be met with articles that have "How to solve X issue" only for the article to never mention it. Those crappy articles are what drove me to Reddit to get solutions from actual people (RIP Reddit)

This really shows what kind of an opinion they have of their readers. I can't believe that they think their readers would want to hear anything that a regurgitation engine would generate. There's no way they aren't dooming their publications in the long term with moves like these.