Today, several staffers at G/O Media (which previously employed all of us here at Aftermath) pointed out the proliferation of AI-generated articles on news site Quartz. Written in a style that would get a high school “introduction to writing” student a B for effort, they… I can’t even think of a good way to sum them up, the whole thing just sucks.
As of publishing, the “Quartz Intelligence Newsroom” has written 22 articles today, running the gamut from earnings reports to Reddit communities banning Twitter posts to the Sackler settlement to, delightfully, a couple articles about how much AI sucks. Quartz has been running AI-generated articles for months, but prior to yesterday, they appear to have been limited to summaries of earnings reports rather than news articles. Boilerplate at the bottom of these articles notes that “This is the first phase of an experimental new version of reporting. While we strive for accuracy and timeliness, due to the experimental nature of this technology we cannot guarantee that we’ll always be successful in that regard.”
The articles, to their credit, do cite where the AI is gathering its information from. But even this is surface level: the Reddit article, for instance, cites Yahoo and the New York Post, but the Yahoo post is actually a repub from the Daytona Beach News-Journal, and the Post article cites NBC News as its own source. I cannot imagine how this game of telephone could go wrong, especially when letting a robot write news about contentious public figures and rapidly changing events.
G/O previously experimented with AI-generated articles back in 2023, most memorably producing a chronological list of Star Wars entries that wasn’t chronological, and a bunch of garbage on The AV Club and Deadspin. None of these sites are owned by G/O anymore; Quartz is one of three sites that are still standing, as well as commerce site The Inventory. Of those remaining sites, Kotaku saw layoffs back in November, and The Root recently made the news when, following the death of a writer, the site’s deputy editor asked staffers to write more to compensate.
All of which makes Quartz’s use of AI just more proof–not that you need it–of how little G/O cares about the people who work there, and how little it thinks of its audience’s intelligence. (What self-respecting reader wouldn’t feel their knowledge of the world had been enriched after reading a line like “By focusing on the elimination of fake reviews, both entities aim to bolster the integrity of the digital marketplace, thereby preserving consumer trust and ensuring fair competition among businesses.”?)
While I at first vainly attempted to parse the logic behind this, one interpretation is that news stories have the best potential to generate traffic, which could pave the way for G/O to tout increased traffic numbers to potential buyers and show off the power of its AI technology in the process. As long as a buyer doesn’t look too closely at the actual AI-generated articles, or pay any attention to the response to them (easy to do now that G/O sites no longer have comments), they could fall for the con.
Anyone tricked into reading this slop (which I suppose now also includes me, hate-reading it), is just helping Jim Spanfeller and his cronies continue destroying a once-beloved network in the most embarrassing way possible. But hey, to quote an AI article that went up as I was writing this, “The strategic focus on AI by Zuckerberg is poised to potentially influence investor sentiment and may further enhance Meta’s competitive edge.”
