Substack readers may be paying for AI-generated newsletters, Medium full of slop too
Substack readers may be paying for AI-generated newsletters, Medium full of slop too
Substack is a hugely popular newsletter platform. Top writers can draw in over $1 million a year in subscriptions. But a lot of these top blogs may be at least partly AI slop. AI detection startup …
If it's not AI, it's literal fucking Nazis
Friends don't let friends browse substack
From the Wired story:
As a comparison, Cui cited another analysis that GPTZero ran on Wikipedia earlier this year, which estimated that around one in 20 articles on the site are likely AI-generated—about half the frequency of the posts GPTZero looked at on Substack.
That should be one in 20 new articles, per the story they cite, which is ultimately based on arXiv:2410.08044.
David Skilling, a sports agency CEO who runs the popular soccer newsletter Original Football (over 630,000 subscribers), told WIRED he sees AI as a substitute editor. “I proudly use modern tools for productivity in my businesses,” says Skilling.
Babe wake up, a new insufferable prick just dropped.
Edit to add: There's an interesting example here of a dubious claim being laundered into truthiness. That arXiv preprint says this in the conclusion section.
Shao et al. (2024) have even designed a retrieval-based LLM workflow for writing Wikipedia-like articles and gathered perspectives from experienced Wikipedia editors on using it—the editors unanimously agreed that it would be helpful in their pre-writing stage.
But if we dig up arXiv:2402.14207, we find that the "unanimous" agreement depends upon lumping together "somewhat" and "strongly agree" on their Likert scale. Moreover, this grand claim rests upon a survey of a grand total of ten people. Ten people, we hasten to add, who agreed to the study in the first place, practically guaranteeing a response bias against those Wikipedians who find "AI" morally repugnant.
AI slop? On my website full of mostly garbage articles? Well I never.
shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.gifNot to make too hot a take, but Casablanca is a really good movie.
Ya know what? Sure. This website has plenty of posts complaining about AI already. This is now a Casablanca appreciation thread.
I also think it's a great movie which holds up spectacularly well. Despite my efforts, I struggle to appreciate many "classic" films (Vertigo is overrated, and I will die on that hill). However, Casablanca is just perfect. It's a compelling concept, turned into a tight script, and performed by skilled actors. It really is an all-time classic, and I recommend it to everyone.
Actually, I kinda want to say more than that.
It's a movie about a guy who has grown cynical from years of anti-fascist action, though he's bit tsundere about his allegiance. In the end he chooses to bear the jealousy over his lover and abandon his life of convenience and comfort to fight for what's ultimately right.
It's a movie that resonates all these decades later, forgoing easy answers for a real stance. And it's amazingly quotable.
Also remembered this video essay about it.