As the editor of a content mill that churns out a great article every 4.2 seconds, such as “Five Hacks for Roku” and “Seven Hacks for Roku,” I feel the need to address the rise of artificial intelligence and its threats Take a stand. Pose to my team of human writers, whom we treat as robots.
Of course, our articles maintain strict Search Engine Optimization Creatively similar to the template for the poorly run Quiznos Kitchen, sure, all of our story ideas were gleaned from better-written magazine articles from seven months ago (and we didn’t plagiarize at all), but imagine if the A.I. What about that article? A lot of things will be lost.
We’ve hired real human writers, from teenagers who happened to own a computer and knew how to piece together 1,200 unreadable words in 20 minutes, to people who were desperately clinging to the last limb of a failing industry but couldn’t quite make it that fast. The elderly writer who wrote 1,200 words. will be let go. What would happen to terms if we simply plugged them into an AI article program? Self-worth, maybe, but at what cost? (Obviously, not for us, since we paid with Slack chat emoticons and had no exposure.)
This article “How to Change Oil with a Melon Ball Machine” and seventeen other “How to Change Oil with…” templates would not be the same unless a human wrote them. Even if AI writing is indistinguishable from our endless content, covering every topic imaginable, where is the core of it? Where is the passion?
AI cannot be exploited, condescended to, or driven to work faster out of fear of losing low-wage jobs. Robots don’t get stress headaches or learn how to kiss my ass even though I know they hate me. If I were using an AI program, how could I feel empowered at the expense of despair? AI doesn’t breathe, love, or bleed (something my fellow editors and I try to eliminate from our freelancers as quickly as possible).
Will an AI program get an erection when it realizes it makes it harder for actual publications that respect writers to compete? I do. Do they take pride in knowing they are offering the public the lowest possible form of writing that can produce pamphlets all over the world? Vehicle Administration Looks interesting? No, they don’t. They’re just content to lose the feeling of hurting others, like I was when I was nine when I stepped on a lizard and smiled.
I was hired two weeks ago to replace the site editor who was hired six weeks ago, and in that time I’ve gained so much experience, seen so many writers come and go, and frantically tried to get just one article , and has published thousands of viral articles. You don’t achieve this with quality or originality, you achieve this with a steady stream of text, images, and hyperlinks that lead directly back to our website in a hideous Möbius strip of content.
So as an editor who regularly sends warning emails to writers about not hitting 80,000 words per week, I implore you to resist the urge to use artificial intelligence programs to create content. People wondering if the article “Seven Remakes We Want to Happen” was written by a real person who took a pay cut because he didn’t meet the minimum click quota, tell me to fuck off.
There’s real emotion going into this (I mean, this post isn’t necessarily a “go to hell” reaction) and I don’t want to live in a world that doesn’t take time (6.8 seconds) to recognize the value of something real.