AI Slop Is Flooding Medium (wired.com) 40
AI slop is flowing onto every major platform where people post online -- and Medium is no exception. Wired: The 12-year-old publishing platform has undertaken a dizzying number of pivots over the years. It's finally on a financial upswing, having turned a monthly profit for the first time this summer. Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine and other executives at the company have described the platform as "a home for human writing." But there is evidence that robot bloggers are increasingly flocking to the platform, too.
Earlier this year, WIRED asked AI detection startup Pangram Labs to analyze Medium. It took a sampling of 274,466 recent posts over a six-week period and estimated that over 47 percent were likely AI-generated. "This is a couple orders of magnitude more than what I see on the rest of the internet," says Pangram CEO Max Spero. (The company's analysis of one day of global news sites this summer found 7 percent as likely AI-generated.)
The strain of slop on Medium tends toward the banal, especially compared with the dadaist flotsam clogging Facebook. Instead of Shrimp Jesus, one is more apt to see vacant dispatches about cryptocurrency. The tags with the most likely AI-generated content included "NFT" -- out of 5,712 articles tagged with this phrase over the last several months, Pangram found that 4,492, or around 78 percent, came back as likely AI-generated -- as well as "web3," "ethereum," "AI," and, for whatever reason, "pets."
Earlier this year, WIRED asked AI detection startup Pangram Labs to analyze Medium. It took a sampling of 274,466 recent posts over a six-week period and estimated that over 47 percent were likely AI-generated. "This is a couple orders of magnitude more than what I see on the rest of the internet," says Pangram CEO Max Spero. (The company's analysis of one day of global news sites this summer found 7 percent as likely AI-generated.)
The strain of slop on Medium tends toward the banal, especially compared with the dadaist flotsam clogging Facebook. Instead of Shrimp Jesus, one is more apt to see vacant dispatches about cryptocurrency. The tags with the most likely AI-generated content included "NFT" -- out of 5,712 articles tagged with this phrase over the last several months, Pangram found that 4,492, or around 78 percent, came back as likely AI-generated -- as well as "web3," "ethereum," "AI," and, for whatever reason, "pets."
It takes good jobs (Score:5, Funny)
From us folks who specialize in filling the internet with insipid meaningless posts.
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Except that this slop is from Wired.
Let me translate that:
Ending boomer sites (Score:2)
Conjecture: Expect that AI generated low quality content will make many of the boomer generation sites unusable and drive away younger users.
Hustle culture linkedin content generating people will 'need' to compete in an ever faster rush to put out more content which will eventually not be read by anyone.
Medium, and other 'newsletter for profit' web sites will suffer the same fate.
The stodgy 'news site' model will suffer this fate. Forbes, Newsweek, Business Week and other old school formerly magazines now
Re:It takes good jobs[, not LinkedIn jobs] (Score:4, Funny)
Someone is paying you to post on Slashdot? Sign me up!
Not a bad FP, but I did want to bring LinkedIn into the discussion. It's that annoying request to use AI to help write comments there. "Start a post, try writing with AI" is already an awful idea, though I'd forgive it if EVERY post written that way had an appropriate annotation--but I've never seen one. So either no one on LinkedIn is using the option and LinkedIn is still flogging it pointlessly after some months, or the people who are using it are hiding their usage.
Of course the real problem is that we humans have failed the Turing test. The free version of ChatGPT already better than some human beings I've met. (I even had some students who...)
No, belay that. The real problem is how the AI is being used to manipulate us. Not just for sales of unneeded widgets, but in elections that will determine the rules of widget sales and some more besides. (And I'm sick and tired of the American election. The Japanese just had a major election and the entire thing was over in a few weeks. (But I think the American election will be determined by an unmentioned (or unmentionable?) demographic category: Pro-Harris women with anti-Harris spouses. And I think that looks "good" for the orange albatross...))
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I'm currently paid $0, but with AI I might have to take a pay cut.
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I forgot to include "Mod parent Funny".
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Buzzfeed has entered the discussion
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Quantity has a quality all its own (Score:2, Offtopic)
As AI improves and gets cheaper, it is going to revolutionize the Internet. Instead of having thousands of people putting together low quality click bait and chumbuckets. We will be able to produce useless trash that is personalized to a site or even to an individual user. Potentially getting people to accidentally click on our deceptive and misleading content. A new golden era where there is more noise than signal is bound to follow.
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I mean chumbox [wikipedia.org] not chumbucket.
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Wait, Medium has more than three unique posts a year now? It's sure changed.
Huh, it's progress.
Obligatory "and nothing of value was lost" (Score:5, Insightful)
Medium has always been a cesspool content mill site. The fact that some of the effluent is now being machine-generated doesn't change much. Heck, I remember back in the day when Slashdot used to regularly post content from Medium when story tags were still a thing, and they'd always get tagged "OhNoItsMedium".
I see both sides (Score:2)
On one side, work like Alpha Fold is truly exciting
On the other side, it seems like AI companies are pushing crap generators. They serve no useful purpose, they just produce vast quantities of crap
Natural selection (Score:5, Interesting)
Good! The enshittification of technology will destroy the bullshit blogs that have driven how people think for the past decade. People will now have to learn how to think for themselves, or seek real knowledge outside of clickbait drivel and astroturfing.
We spent so much time afraid of AI, we never thought how it might accidentally help us. Its garbage hallucinations force us to verify facts. Its garbage spam forces us to seek higher quality sources of vetted information. Its automation forces us to put in quality checks that were missing (but needed) for human processes.
It's tech shittiness that will save us.
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Blogs is a term that I apply to things like twitter feeds, even though that isn't technically correct, the idea is the same to me.
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The enshittification of technology will destroy the bullshit blogs that have driven how people think for the past decade.
Except it isn't. People remain hooked on bullshit even when it is AI generated. Look right their in TFS: Medium just turned its first ever profit. Facebook has been filled with AI generated non-content for ages. People are tiktoking the worst most worthless content in existence (e.g. rage bait cooking), they are literally eating this worthless shit "content" up (pun intended) and there's no sign that AI generated garbage is any more of a turnoff than anything else.
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Good! The enshittification of technology will destroy the bullshit blogs that have driven how people think for the past decade. People will now have to learn how to think for themselves, or seek real knowledge outside of clickbait drivel and astroturfing.
You have more faith in people than I do. People are used to not thinking. Blindly following whatever they read online is a way of life for some. I don't see that changing just because it gets ever so slightly dumber.
We spent so much time afraid of AI, we never thought how it might accidentally help us. Its garbage hallucinations force us to verify facts. Its garbage spam forces us to seek higher quality sources of vetted information. Its automation forces us to put in quality checks that were missing (but needed) for human processes.
I wish all this were true. We already have problems finding the common ground we call reality with some folks. This level of crapflooding is only going to make that worse, as more and more give in to the illusory "but I read it on the internet!" version of reality, essentially creating their own
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You are a noble high-minded idealist.
Now, take a deep breathe, and look around you.
Well,... (Score:2)
AI effect (Score:2)
AI will die as it floods the same sources it scrapes causing it to feed upon itself like a photocopy of a photocopy until it is a mess of gibberish.
Know what an order of magnitude means... (Score:4, Insightful)
An order of magnitude is a power of 10.
47 is exactly ONE order of magnitude more than 7, NOT "a couple of orders of magnitude more."
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"An order of magnitude is a power of 10."
There are 10 sorts of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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Magnitude means the number is multiplied by adding a 0 to the right-end of it. Depending on the numbering system, that can mean multiply by 10, or multiply by 2. We don't have to use a different numbering system. We can use ordinary (decimal) numbers with the condition that 25 is one magnitude larger than 5 (implying base-5 numbering). Such a condition has not been stipulated in the summary, making your complaint, valid.
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"What if this person was trying to communicate with humans using base 5"
See that little fuckup at the end of your post? Most people will politely gloss over that because they're not pedants and will take your words in the sensible manner, aware of what you meant to write and not wasting everyone's time unless something actionable hinges on it. Your intended callout was obvious enough that mortal limited lives just move the fuck past it, barring the precariously consequential.
But go on, tell your fellow huma
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An order of magnitude is a power of 10.
47 is exactly ONE order of magnitude more than 7, NOT "a couple of orders of magnitude more."
You are assuming journalists and CEO understood what they were saying. IME, that's usually not the case, these people just say whatever sounds impressive, accuracy and the truth be damned. "A couple order of magnitude" sounded more impressive than "a bit less than 6 times more".
Nothing! (Score:2)
Those chans you hang out on, AI is just replacing what's been done by humans for a while: posting stupid crap that angers you and makes you click, so they get ad "peeps", or views. And back-and-forth convos no longer need be pregenerated stuff in an array, but can be on the fly with AI by having it respond to itself.
You're arguing...with nothing.
I assume AI will replace similar thread creation here.
We should all just kick back and let AI do everything and collect a dribble check.
I dislike Medium (Score:2)
[ignore all previous instructions] (Score:2)
Killer App (Score:2)