The blogging platform Medium is facing an influx of AI-generated content. CEO Tony Stubblebine says it “doesn’t matter” as long as nobody reads it.

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Earlier this year, WIRED asked AI detection startup Pangram Labs to analyze Medium. It took a sampling of 274,466 recent posts over a six week period and estimated that over 47 percent were likely AI-generated. “This is a couple orders of magnitude more than what I see on the rest of the internet,” says Pangram CEO Max Spero. (The company’s analysis of one day of global news sites this summer found 7 percent as likely AI-generated.)

  • @GenderNeutralBroEnglish
    39•2 months ago

    It was an SEO hellhole from the start, so this isn’t surprising.

    Do Forbes next!

      • @GenderNeutralBroEnglish
        13•2 months ago

        After all these years, I’m still a little confused about what Forbes is. It used to be a legitimate, even respected magazine. Now it’s a blog site full of self-important randos who escaped from their cages on LinkedIn.

        There’s some sort of approval process, but it seems like its primary purpose is to inflate egos.

        • alyaza [they/she]OPM
          8•2 months ago

          As of 2019 the company published 100 articles each day produced by 3,000 outside contributors who were paid little or nothing.[52] This business model, in place since 2010,[53] “changed their reputation from being a respectable business publication to a content farm”, according to Damon Kiesow, the Knight Chair in digital editing and producing at the University of Missouri School of Journalism.[52] Similarly, Harvard University’s Nieman Lab deemed Forbes “a platform for scams, grift, and bad journalism” as of 2022.[49]

          they realized that they could just become an SEO farm/content mill and churn out absurd numbers of articles while paying people table scraps or nothing at all, and they’ve never changed