Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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In December, we noticed that articles we spent significant amounts of time on—reporting that involved weeks or months of research, talking to and protecting sources, filing public records requests, paying for and parsing those records, hours or days of writing, editing, and packaging—were being scraped by bots, run through an AI article “spinner” or paraphraser, and republished on random websites.
✏️ The deadliness of AI “journalism”. Many of their articles, when available for free on the site, and which they probably spent months of hard work on, become instantly reworded/reworked/republished by AI and displayed on tons of other random ass sites. 🔗 View Highlight
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AI tools that promise to “spin” articles for their users. One, called SpinRewriter, lets users create 1,000 slightly different versions of the same article with a single click and to automatically publish them to as many WordPress sites as you want using a paid plugin. It also offers a tool that lets users manage as many websites as they want from a single dashboard. A company called Byword gleefully advertises the “SEO heist” that “stole 3.6M total traffic from a competitor” with this One Weird Trick (exporting the competitor’s sitemap and creating AI generated versions of 1,800 of their articles).
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A screenshot of Byword explicitly telling users to paste their “competitors’ article URLs.”
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Jason signed up for a Byword account, fed it the URLs of some of our articles, and was able to instantly generate articles based on them. They were not good, but they were article-shaped and came with AI-generated images. Byword also allows you to use AI to generate social media posts about the articles. Byword can connect to WordPress, has a feature where you can “Generate articles by scraping lists of your competitors’ URLs,” and is planning to launch a tool that will allow people to generate articles based directly on the sitemap of the website they’re trying to “compete with.” This is all powered by GPT-4
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a flood of low-quality, AI-generated bullshit—articles written by robots to appease a robotic search ranking algorithm—is going to drown out what we do, and make it harder to organically find our work