Process
Status Items Highlights Done See section below Claims None Questions None Output None
Highlights
id914789741
So many publications are leaning into ‘how can we use AI to be more efficient to publish more,’ and it’s not going to work. It’s not going to work because you’re competing against a child in Romania, a child in Bangladesh who is publishing 9,000 articles a day and they don’t care about facts, they don’t care about accuracy, but in an SEO algorithm it’s going to perform and that’s what you’re competing against
id914789727
You have to compete on quality at this point and you have to find a real human being audience and you need to speak to them directly and treat them as though they are intelligent and not as though you are trying to feed them as much slop as possible.”
id914789836
AI is destroying traffic, ripping off our work, creating slop that destroys discoverability and further undermines trust, and allows random people to create news-shaped objects that social media and search algorithms either can’t or don’t care to distinguish from real news.
id914794495
the days of media companies tricking people into reading their articles using SEO or hitting a trending algorithm are over. They are over because other people are doing it better than them now, and by “better,” I mean, more shamelessly and with reckless abandon. As we have written many times, news outlets are no longer just competing with each other, but with everyone on social media, and Netflix, and YouTube, and TikTok, and all the other people who post things on the internet. They are not just up against the total fracturing of social media, the degrading and enshittification of the discovery mechanisms on the internet, algorithms that artificially ding links to articles, AI snippets and summaries, etc. They are also competing with sophisticated AI slop and spam factories often being run by people on the other side of the world publishing things that look like “news” that is being created on a scale that even the most “efficient” journalist leveraging AI to save some perhaps negligible amount of time cannot ever hope to measure up to.