Quartz website mainly produced by one AI-assisted reporter writing 50+ stories per day
3 days ago by beep to c/technology
cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/...
Seems like it should theoretically be possible to have AI subscribe to all the news feeds (AP, Reuters, NewsWire, public reporting databases, legal and police feeds, websites of all registered non-profits, etc.) and generate hyper-localized page content linked to an ad network.
As long as you pull in more in ad revenue than you pay in tokens and infrastructure costs, it’s a win — once someone sets up such a system, they just need to fix things when they break; most of the process would be automated and self-healing.
I’m surprised we haven’t seen more attempts at this. Would it be slop? Definitely. But it would be profitable slop.
It's more common than you think probably. I clocked Quartz spamming reddit with garbage articles sometime in the mid-2010s. Who and what are these sites even. What are their credentials. Why did they suddenly spring up out of nowhere???
It didn't require modern AI like LLMs. Simpler algorithms of copying articles and paraphrasing them have existed for a very long time.
Maybe over a decade ago web development reached a point when anyone could relatively easily churn out professional looking site designs. Most of the news sites we've been fed has been garbage such as you've described.
One source that nobody seems to ever notice is company press release pages. Boring reports that nobody otherwise cares about gets turned into clickbait headlines.
Business Company posts a routine boring press release on their website: "Business Stuff happened at the business factory. Business as usual."
What you see generated for these garbage news sites: "Breaking News. Business Company announces MASSIVE BREAKTHROUGH in Business Stuff. Rival business factories on suicide watch?"
You don't need LLMs or AI in general. This is basic site scraping.
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