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In the latest update on AI slop, Ars Technica, a once reputable publication of over 25 years, has accidentally published a fake AI written article, complete with fake quotes. Unlike the fake story shared by Nate Silver earlier, which was published on a grifter's glorified blog, and somehow syndicated into Yahoo news, this story was actually published by a "real" media company under its own label. To be fair, the ars article bears few of the obvious hallmarks of AI writing, and it also gets a passing score by most AI detectors. I suspect the authors may have lazily asked AI to create a point by point skeleton for the article, then humanly written the words themselves that appeared on the page (excluding the hallucinated fake quotes of course). Fortunately, the article was taken down quickly, but the editors have so far refused to disclaim the use of AI, amd instead are hiding behind the misquotes as a reason to take the article down. It remains to be seen whether or not the use of AI slop was actually a rouge writer violating the policy, or someone using AI as directed by management but just skimping on the checking its answers part.
In other news, Malewarebytes has joined the ranks of Cloudflare and Lenovo as multi-billion dollar multinationational corporations that decided it's necessary to each publish a library of absolutely worthless AI slop, masquerading without disclosure as legitimate content. These zero effort AI takes are ... well ... zero effort, and provide zero added value to society by being published. I have no idea if Malewarebytes is a good company, but it's certainly a real company, with offices around the globe and enterprise contracts with many fortune 500 companies. These are all companies with sales and marketing teams in the dozens or hundreds of people, and likely multiple layers of approval to do anything new, yet they decided that zero effort AI slop takes are perfectly in line with their brand and reputation. There's clearly some kind of incentives (likely mostly SEO) for real companies to publish loads and loads of fake content on their websites, tangentially or not at all related to their actual business, which is extremely unfortunate because it's a waste of time for anyone who happens across this fake content, and even a waste of time for the slopmeister who has to click the button to generate 10 million words of fake content.
Finally an area where I can comment with experience: crappy marketing.
So you found Malwarebytes latest article to be worthless. I'm sure this contrasts with your long familiarity with their classic blog, and you were previously an avid reader of thrillers like ChromeLoader targets Chrome Browser users with malicious ISO files, no?
First thing: each of the companies mentioned are an order of magnitude different in size, so it's pretty difficult to compare how much each one might spend. Malwarebytes is listed at 500-1000, Cloudflare at 1000-5000, and Lenovo at 10000+. But if you wanted to put out a meaningful blog every workday then you would only need a team of 3-4 permanent writers. Malwarebytes (hereafter MB) manages a bit more than that but with AI now I doubt it's much more than that. Such a team might have a single Head of Content or another Marketing Manager that would approve, and a company like Cloudflare might have a technical review step (but probably not MB), but I'd be shocked if they had anything more than that to get something published.
It's fundamentally different from a journalist outfit like Ars. Their writing is the product, so putting out AI really does drive down value. For every other business, who cares? When was the last time you ever went to an e commerce or other business blog willingly? Probably because {SEO}, you googled and it was the first link, and you swiftly exited. The only difference between now and 5 years ago is that now it is literally zero effort, whereas before it did take a modicum of time. It's not something that will show up in productivity statistics though, since it has never really been clear that this kind of stuff actually has any purpose. Companies, from Lenovo downwards, go through the motions on this. Some people must be reading, because even the smallest company blog can still eke out a few hundred readers, but I've never met anyone that does pay attention.
I don't think there's any feedback either. MB will continue pushing this stuff out until the end. AGI or something else will appear quite suddenly - to them - and wipe this kind of stuff off the map.
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