Owner of Destructoid, The Escapist, Siliconera, and others Fires Writers and Hires for "AI Editor" to Churn Out Hundreds of Articles Per Week

This is fucking gross. There’s no one who thinks people will read the mass shit they pump out.

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.

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.

Hopefully this isn’t the new way everything goes…

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.

*Destructoid; The Escapist; Siliconera; Twinfinite; Dot Esports; Upcomer; Gamepur; Prima Games; PC Invasion; Attack of the Fanboy; Touch, Tap, Play; Pro Game Guides; Gamer Journalist; Operation Sports *and GameSkinny.

Noted. I'm officially starting a "not reading your crap" list.

Any service looking to replace human writers with ai is positioning itself for failure once generative ai becomes more mainstream. Once your average Joe can ask a native phone app for anything they want, the Only value of written text will be the human element.

I know game journalists are memed on, but this is really disappointing. AI will eventually unravel and crap out because it's regurgitating AI content.

So now I know which sites to ignore completely from now on.

Content farms have been polluting the web for years, to the point that search engines are near totally unreliable. But this new wave of AI-powered content farms, and even worse, AI-driven content from once respected and trustworthy orgs, is going to make things exponentially worse

Yo, I don't mean to get all John Connor or anything, but we need to put a stop to and legislate against AI. Full stop.
We already see how it's being misused.

... until someone will use an AI to generate a whole publication... or a whole set of them... or an entire publisher... or an entire holding owning the publisher...

I've just seen Black Mirror S06E01 yesterday night and it did hit deep

This may be a little tangential, but does anyone know of any game news sites with RSS feeds that have talented writers working for them? Some of the sites I've followed for years have been regurgitating Twitter opinions more and more, and it makes finding thoughtful (or just plain informative) articles far more difficult.

I just don't see ChatGPT being capable enough quite yet. These articles are going to be low quality, written in the same voice, and filled with factual errors. Not to mention released at a volume that nobody will bother to keep up with. Seems like self destruction on their part.

Lol, this might be enough to make Yahtzee from Zero Punctuation quit The Escapist; if that happens, they're likely done soon after.

Guess we now know why Nick from The Escapist was fired. They think GPT can do it better.

Sure, flush your websites reputation down the toilet. Good luck with that.

I wonder if this will end as poorly as that eating disorder hotline that did the same thing.

This juxtaposed with all the teachers failing students for using generative AI tells you a lot about the world we live in.

We as humans are already sensationalizing content for clicks. I can’t imagine what content is going to look like even in the near future with AI at the reigns.

One person to edit 250 AI articles per week? I'd be very surprised if they found them.

These generative models are only capable of regurgitation. They're fed content, and they come up with statistical distributions of words and phraes in their training data to sample. But they're still just chopping up other people's copyrighted work and gluing it together.

This gets into generic "you can't copyright individual words" territory when dealing with very common topics, but when you get into niche topics, the training data gets sparse, and the distributions stop allowing for creating something new.

And they can't extrapolate beyond their data. All models break down once you leave the boundaries of the data.

So, any articles generated by these things about something new are either going to be trained on too small a data set to avoid lawsuits, or just be incredibly factually wrong.

And if they're publishing reviews of new games that are full of factual errors, they could get sued for defamation.

This is just stupidly risky on their part.

I used to love the escapist can't say I've gone there much since these guys took over

Ugh, not The Escapist. I mean you see a lot of AI written articles nowadays so it will only ramp up, but it's still bad.

Destructoid was so good for so long. Between this and the fact that they started to bug me about my ad blocker, it's time for me to stop giving them views.

To be honest, I'm intrigued to see just how badly this will go. I expect some open job positions soon

"250 articles a week..." So they are just transitioning to create creating spam? Never read any of those sites but focusing on output just sounds like spam. #filtered

So... these sites are all just random text generators now? What's the point?

It was inevitable that someone would try to use AI like this to make certain jobs obsolete. Sites with content like this will manipulate Google's already garbage algorithms to make it a self-consuming snake.

The only way out is to continue to encourage thoughtful discussions from thoughtful articles. AI could certainly help with information, but perspective and insight is an inherently human trait that will tune people out.

good luck with that, I think after a bit of time us gaming community needs our own domain white/blacklist just so we can filter our search result to the more writer/contributor friendly sites.

And I just unsubscribed from the Escapist and Destructoid RSS feeds. What a bummer. Thanks for the heads up!

Eh, not as big of a deal as people think. You've probably already read lots of AI generated content without even realising it

Someone correct me if I am wrong but ai editor implies the writer will remain and they're using ai ton "fix" the article and write the headline. Isn't that one of the main responsibilities of an editor?

More help from companies on letting me know the websites to stay away from. This isn't the first time DToid did stupid crap. Back on Justin.tv, maybe they had converted to Twitch already, they had a BUNCH of streamers that were ruling the platform, then they said that their streamers would have to review and give positive reviews of sponsored games. All the streamers left the group and Dtoid lost a TON of traction and Twitch exploded from Justin.TV.

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I hope the new EU legislation regarding AI also covers this type of things.