Good thing I spent five years in college sharpening my writing skills, only to be obsoleted by an uppity toaster. That'll make paying my student loans so much easier.
Wouldn’t be the first time and prolly won’t be the last time.
Jamestown.
Jamestowne is home to the ruins of the first permanent English settlement in North America.
104 settlers but only 38 survived
Despite writing describing cannibalism:
“Haveinge fedd upon our horses and other beastes as longe as they Lasted, we weare gladd to make shifte with vermin as doggs Catts, Ratts and myce…as to eate Bootes shoes or any other leather,” he wrote. “And now famin beginneinge to Looke gastely and pale in every face, thatt notheinge was Spared to mainteyne Lyfe and to doe those things which seame incredible, as to digge upp deade corpes outt of graves and to eate them. And some have Licked upp the Bloode which hathe fallen from their weake fellowes.”
Direct evidence of cannibalism at Jamestown, the oldest permanent English colony in the Americas was elusive until recently finding “bones in a trash pit, all cut and chopped up, it’s clear that this body was dismembered for consumption.”
This is freaking hilarious. I might buy this book just to read more of this:
“Imagine you’re stranded on the Red Planet with three crewmembers,” Seedhouse, a professor at Daytona Beach’s Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University wrote. “You have plenty of life-support consumables but only sufficient food to last one person until the rescue party arrives. What do you do?.. One day, while brewing coffee for breakfast, you realize there are three chunks of protein-packed meat living right next to you.”
… the biggest of the Mars explorers should sacrifice themselves first because they “both consume and provide the most food.” He went on to provide a “weirdly detailed look” at how to cut up one’s fellow humans if necessary.
“We don’t know where Seedhouse would fall in the buffet line because we couldn’t find his height and weight online,” the authors wrote, “and honestly we’re scared to ask.”
In “Survival and Sacrifice”… readers will also find… a photo of ten astronauts smiling in space alongside the caption: “In the wrong circumstances, a spacecraft is a platform full of hungry people surrounded by temptation. Is it wrong to waste such a neatly packaged meal?”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
These companies planning to become unnecessary middlemen between you and ChatGPT seem to be kind of short sighted. If you’re not providing your own (often stupid) insight then what do you really provide beyond writing prompts and saving the result on your site.
The fact that I can open up ChatGPT right now and say "Write a Kotaku article about why Tetris is racist" and get a 100% believable result out of it should be a sign that they've been replaceable for a while now.
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.
futurism.com
Aktywne