G/O Media Execs Full Speed Ahead On Injecting Half-Cooked ‘AI’ Into A Very Broken US Media

While early AI" systems have plenty of creativity and productivity potential, early implementations into the already very broken US journalism and media markets have proven to be an ugly mess. In part because the tech isn't really fully cooked yet. But also because the kind of folks that get to run major modern US media companies are incompetent cheapskates.

Media giants like G/O Media and Red Ventures keep implementing such systems at outlets like CNET and Gizmodo (without being transparent with staff about it) and the result has consistently been a lot of error and plagiarism filled articles that lower brand quality under the pretense of progress.

Of the 77 articles published at CNET, more thanhalfhad significant errors. Gizmodo's recent AI-Generated articles have also been terribly written and filled with mistakes. In many instances, it's costing outlets more money to have a human-editor go in and fix errors than it would to just have a human generate the content in the first place.

Actual, human staffers understandably aren't happy, and routinely say that publishers aren't really communicating with staff as to how the technology is being implemented:

G/O employees, who tell me they don't want to talk on the record for fear they'll be disciplined by managers, say they've received no information from their managers about any use of AI - except a heads-up that the AI-written stories were going to appear on the site on July 5, which was sent the same day the stories ran.

The problem here isn't inherently AI." This tech is in its early stages and will inevitably evolve to be very useful in helping to generate and edit content, especially of the rudimentary variety. Nor is this just the grousing of people whose livelihoods are being automated. Because they're not, really. At least not well.

The problem is that lazy and terrible managers are injecting unfinished technology into an already very broken U.S. media sector. And they're doing it without any real transparency, without consulting existing staff, and not with the goal of improving product quality, but with an eye on cutting corners, cutting costs, and leveraging it as a weapon against already underpaid labor.

There's really zero indication that the folks running these outlets give much of a shit about what employees think about much of anything, AI or otherwise. Most of these outlets already violently underpay their staff, routinely bleed talent via mismanagement, aren't genuinely that worried about substandard product, and are blindly chasing max engagement in a broken attention economy.

Even before AI" arrived on the scene, nuance, substance, deep reporting, and smart analysis were increasingly being replaced with sensationalism and clickbait gibberish in a pursuit of short-term wealth. All while reporters and editors are generally paid in pocket lint and broken promises, then laid off in droves while the folks at the top of the chain make out like bandits.

Inject half-cooked machine learning chatbottery into that already broken mess and you're not really revolutionizing anything, you're just supercharging existing dysfunction. Shitty managers at these publications want to act as if they're revolutionizing journalism and media, and insist they're not looking to replace humans and journalism with automated, error-prone clickbait machines.

But long-mistreated staffers at most of these outlets know the score:

Spanfeller and Brown also say they won't use AI to replace G/O's staff. Our goal is to hire more journalists," Spanfeller said. (Spanfeller notes that, like other media companies - includingVox Media, which owns this site-G/O has laid off employeesbecause of this crappy economic market" - but called it a de minimis amount of reduction.")

That argument doesn't persuade G/O staff, who say they assume G/O will inevitably use the tech to replace them.

This is a not-so-veiled attempt to replace real journalism with machine-generated content," another G/O journalist told me. G/O's MO is to make staff do more and more and publish more and more. It has never ceased to be that. This is a company that values quantity over quality."

It would be one thing if this technology was being introduced transparently in a way that aids staff, boosts productivity, and improves product quality. But that's most assuredly not what's happening here. What's happening here is incompetent, fail upward, trust fund brunchlords looking to build a massive, cheaply made, automated clickbait and bullshit generation machine that effectively shits money.

Real journalism, real progress, or real quality simply doesn't enter into it.