Quarz feuert alle Schriftsteller ab, nachdem er zu AI Slop gezogen ist
https://futurism.com/quartz-fires-writers-ai-slop
Quarz feuert alle Schriftsteller ab, nachdem er zu AI Slop gezogen ist
https://futurism.com/quartz-fires-writers-ai-slop
24 Kommentare
Submission statement: how do you think AI is going to affect jobs in the future?
Do you think there will always be things that humans can do better, or do you think that’s just wishful thinking, and it’s just a matter of time before AI is better at any possible job?
What then?
Will there be UBI, or vast inequality, or worse yet, will AIs treat us the way we treat our fellow less intelligent earthlings – animals?
Wow haven’t read them in years but did enjoy some of their content. This is sad.
Good luck to any company that decides to do that right now…….. spoilers it doesn’t end well
Read: we’re going bankrupt, can’t raise and this is one last desperate cover.
I don’t understand why any media publication business would adopt this model.
The readers who purposefully come to a website will be put off knowing that the writing there isn’t created by people. How could they trust it knowing that?
Wrong move, Google has asked raters to assign lowest value to AI-generated content.
This kind of thing is only going to make AI worse as AI will now be scraping more and more AI to learn from in a snowball of dogshit, useless content.
This is a straight-up blunder. Out of the box, AI is good at sounding authoritative, but it’s terrible at almost everything else. And even top tech companies struggle to make it do genuinely valuable things.
If a site’s content is all generated by LLMs, it becomes a mere middleman for chatgpt. And I don’t see any value added there, I can already go to chatgpt and ask it to write articles about anything. I think that will be a trap for anyone whose business model boils down to „we’ll prompt an LLM for you“. No thanks, I can easily do that now.
It may take a few years to roll out UBIs globally … But IMHO it’s better to let the printing machines continue to go brrr than to have to face the disruption, protests, borderline anarchy that would come from an army of young, strong, 20-40 years old who are minimally employed and unhappy. It would be more cost effective for every nation to provide a semblance of personal success and happiness to their citizens than to have to provide the forces necessary to police this segment of their population.
If someone can’t be bothered to write it, I won’t be bothered to read it.
We should have a AI slop extension blocking sites that are known for doing this, just like we have adblock and noscript.
what’s the over and under for when they fold and sell their remaining assets?
Whats your business model when you use a tool everyone in the world has access to. Admitting that journalism will become all AI-generated is way too simplistic.
Think about a world where everyone has access to language. Anyone can write an article and the internet is essentially flooded with language. Where then is the differentiation? Do people come back to really novel, outside the box analytical pieces? Does media shift away from language? Does language shift away from AI-style wording. You can’t just do something anyone can now do in a way it’s always been done and expect to be even remotely successful.
The sign that a company is likely nearing financial ruin. They smack the final nail in their own head.
Never heard of Quartz before.
Looks like this will be the last time too.
Publishing AI content is like printing out a google search.
It’s a complete misunderstanding of the technology’s strengths and weaknesses by people who are too entrenched in the old tech to learn.
If generative AI becomes a big part of our society going forward, it sure won’t be because people copy/pasted it onto a magazine’s website. Anyone who really wants to read that for some reason can generate it for themselves.
If generative AI does become big, it’s only going to be because people have embraced its uniqueness : The ability to work *interactively* in real-time. The ability to customize content on a per-user basis. If you don’t need that, and you’re still using AI, you’re just making slop that nobody wants.
Maybe nobody needs that. Maybe generative AI will shrink to a small niche. Or maybe society will embrace how flexible it is and find exciting new uses for it. I don’t know. But I’m 100% sure that the future isn’t copy/pasting AI text into a blog.
So I worked for Atlantic Media who owned Quartz for a few years.
Unfortunately the brand was sold off like four times in it’s brief ten year lifespan. The most recent buyers bought it almost purely for the email list.
More info on the rise and fall of QZ from its founder here:
https://www.zachseward.com/what-was-quartz/
I feel like th AI stuff in the future will be talked about the same way machines took jobs from like black smiths and leather shoe makes, well, just ppl who made stuff in general, the machines took their jobs. Remember, that actually happened and thoes where for things that are not even really considered luxury. Ppl took the hit in quality for a better price, art and writing IS almost always a luxury thing, so I def don’t see anyone carrying too much about it.
The AI will write a brilliant obituary for Quartz, I have no doubt.
„do you think there will be things humans always do better“
… No? Unless you believe in super natural hoopla, the special human sauce is a massively parallel meat computer. I see literally no reason why once you learn the constituents of said meat computer you couldn’t then make it far faster, starting off with making it out of something other than meat.
*Any* time some dummy asks „is self driving possible? Is self awareness possible? Is „x“ possible?“ Yes. Of course it is. If humans did it, it can be done. So it’s possible. And we have every reason to believe metal circuitry is going to do the same thing but much, much, much faster.
This isn’t really about AI. I was working at G/O Media when it was purchased by the group that put Spanfeller in charge, and it soon dawned on us that the end goal of the aquisition was to strip the company of parts. And that’s exactly what happened. AI writing is just one of the many many cost cutting measures that took place at the company. This move is just another accounting schenanigan. The buyer probably only wants the brand. I’m so sick of private equity.
Why exactly do these publications think that I would pay to read their AI content, when I can generate it myself for free?
When I read an article, it’s because I genuinely want to hear another person’s voice and perspective. That’s the part I’m paying for.
It’s cheaper than the human slop and about as good.