How to Kill the Web

In the last week, two stories broke about how AI-generated content severely harms not only those trying to produce articles for the web, but insults readers as well. The first story comes from this gloating jabroni about how his team used AI to plagiarize a competitor and steal their placement among search results:

While it’s not surprising to see this guy bragging about his own laziness, you can also see how smug he is about gaming the system. Furthermore, because his actions weren’t particularly ingenious, there’s nothing stopping anyone else from repeating the same ploy. This will continue to gunk up the system with AI nonsense climbing the ranks of Google, which continues to be increasingly useless at search, the one thing that, despite Alphabet’s many other products, is what the company is best known for.

Although sometimes you don’t even need some crook to use AI on your site if you’re just going to employ it yourself. Sports Illustrated got caught employing AI writers with phony bylines and profiles to generate articles for its website. After first ignoring Futurism’s request for comment, SI’s publisher, The Arena Group, claimed ignorance that a third-party contractor was creating AI-generated articles without SI’s knowledge. As Futurism points out, that claim strains credulity.

It’s also highly unlikely that Sports Illustrated is the only outlet making use of AI-generated articles. After all, if you’re like The Arena Group, then the math is easy. You’re trying to game Google results, the best way to do that is to spam SEO articles, and the cheapest way to do that is to have AI whip up a bunch of that material. This is the trajectory we came to after gutting newsrooms of full-time employees, then moving to freelancers (don’t have to pay those guys benefits!), then slashing freelance budgets so you pay desperate people almost nothing to crank out articles, and now you can remove a lot of humans entirely by asking AI to create a rough facsimile of writing. After all, once you’ve got the click, the content doesn’t matter so much as long a site hits the keywords and article length Google’s algorithm is looking for. Publishers and Silicon Valley have effectively created a system where computers write for the benefit of other computers. The hapless human who just wanted to read something is out of luck.

Even if the publication hasn’t given itself over to AI, the need for maximum ad dollars has rendered even the most prestigious of outlets unreadable. Speaking from personal experience, when I go to read an article on The Hollywood Reporter, the site will inevitably crash halfway through reading an article due to the ad load on a mobile browser, so the page reloads, starts at the top, and then I have to find my place again. While there are workarounds like ad-blockers or “Reader Mode,” the owners of the publication (in this case, Penske Media Corporation) are cramming in as many ads as possible, and far beyond what the mobile site’s architecture will bear for the user experience.

On the one hand, I don’t begrudge The Hollywood Reporter this ad load because they’re in the same desperate situation as most publications find themselves these days, and actions like Sports Illustrated hiring an AI firm to generate AI articles exists on the same spectrum: the people at the top want to squeeze blood from the stone, and they’re willing to churn out a weaker product to make it happen. The owners want a massive, consistent return, but the ad dollars are largely going into the pockets of Google or social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok. Advertisers will still market on websites, but the presentation and amount of ads required to turn a profit means the actual article delivered to readers invariably suffers. This means hoping that the ad code won’t crash your site, but also making sure your website fits the “brand safety” and “suitability” by not mentioning things like “abortion” and “sex.”

All of this bums me out because it’s anti-human. It disrespects both author and reader. I don’t want to romanticize the days of print publications or the early days of the World Wide Web, but there was a period where we found a way to strike a balance between advertising and quality. That balance is gone now, and it creates far more losers than winners. Even the advertisers take a hit with ad buys that don’t yield sales, and companies wasting money chasing consumers across various platforms. This forces those companies to become reliant on a tech industry that is pushing its own nonsense products (remember pivot to video?).

That’s why I’m glad to have a little newsletter right now. It may not be the biggest kid on the block, but it’s allowing me to write for people without the crushing demands of ad buys or trying to game Google into making what I write the top search result. And look—I’ll probably never be at the top of the heap. I don’t write anything incendiary to bait engagement, and I don’t believe a relentless, myopic grind is the way to success. But I like what I’ve done here, and I’ve stuck with it long enough (almost two years!) that I’m considering turning on subscriptions in 2024 because I want to show that this smaller-scale business model is one where we can serve writers and readers rather than engage in a vampiric model that siphons all the value from a publication before leaving behind a withered husk on the Internet.

What I’m Watching

Here’s a little inside baseball about how awards season works: Studios wait until November to start making sure their movies get in front of critics groups’ members. They’re leaning heavy on recency bias, so studios (or the PR companies repping them) ask for your screening deadline, voting deadline, and announcement date months in advance (usually around July/August). Then, about a week or so before your voting deadline, they flood your mailbox with discs and your inbox with links. They hope that if you see a movie the week before you vote, it’s more likely to make your list than a film you saw back in March or April. I don’t think that’s how it pans out (last year’s big winner was Everything, Everywhere All at Once, which premiered in March), but you try telling an awards marketing department to maybe send their screeners in early October rather than late November.

This is all to say I’m both playing catch-up (finally saw How to Blow Up a Pipeline and loved it) and trying to watch stuff that hasn’t come to theaters yet (Ferrari is a bust). I’ve got three screenings this week and a pile of screeners where I’m trying to make a dent in international features and documentaries so I can make an educated vote.

What I’m Hearing

I really enjoyed the soundtrack to Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. The band Anamanaguchi composed the score, which is a nice little callback since they also handled the music for the Scott Pilgrim vs. the World video game.

What I’m Playing

I’m still playing Super Mario RPG, but I also made some time for The Gardens Between, which is a soothing little puzzler where you forward and reverse time to advance through levels. It’s a good indie game that’s worth checking out.