Welcome to Part II* of Edition No. 50 of my weekly newsletter, providing practical analysis in the world of digital content strategy.
*They’re coming out of order this week
Contents
I. When AI-Assisted Content Goes Wrong
II. Twitter Reaches a Fork in the Road
III. Latest Core Google Search Update Complete
IV. Two More Points for Bing’s AI Chatbot
V. Elon Takes Twitter’s Top Spot
I. When AI-Assisted Content Goes Wrong
Futurism published an interesting analysis of BuzzFeed’s AI farm of content that has evolved beyond quizzes.
"I think that there are two paths for AI in digital media," Peretti told CNN. "One path is the obvious path that a lot of people will do — but it's a depressing path — using the technology for cost savings and spamming out a bunch of SEO articles that are lower quality than what a journalist could do, but a tenth of the cost."
BuzzFeed quietly started publishing fully AI-generated articles that are produced by non-editorial staff — and they sound a lot like the content mill model that Peretti had promised to avoid.
Futurism found glaring examples of nearly identical phrases across several different articles, such as referring to each of more than a dozen different travel destinations as “gems.”
🛠 Why does this matter? If you read anything I have shared here in the last few weeks, you’ll know I’m a huge proponent of using AI to assist content creation.
In what it called an experiment, BuzzFeed, in this case, has clearly skipped the assisted part and gone straight to “AI-produced.” This is a lose-lose for publishers and readers alike.
For readers because, well, let me count the ways. It’s insulting. It’s incredibly dumbed down. It adds no value that a reader couldn’t have figured out on their own by searching or using a chatbot. It’s simply unoriginal and lacking effort.
For publishers because this could quickly turn into a race to the bottom. You can find people all over LinkedIn and Twitter bragging about how they topped Google’s SERP with AI-generated content. (Some of it good content that they have refined with a human touch.)
But there’s also the Verge’s printer review we talked about last week, which is a much more transparent version of what BuzzFeed appears to have done.
Hopefully, we can chalk this up to an experimental phase of AI tools becoming commonplace in the content creation process. If not, there will be so much content overlap from publications that over-index on AI that we won’t need most of them because they’ll simply be competing to say the same thing.
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II. Twitter Reaches a Fork in the Road
🛠 Why does this matter? Musk’s argument is that the only way to salvage Twitter’s For You feed is to make people you don’t follow pay to show up there.
I say that the best way to solve this would be to not force the For You feed down our throats. Why not just fill our feed only with users we follow to begin with?
If I want to follow a bot, I will. If not, it won’t show up in my feed unless someone I do follow retweets it.
Ahh, but money.
It’s a very fair “but” considering that, according to Musk, Twitter has lost more than half its value since he acquired it.
“Legacy” verified Twitter accounts will lose their checkmarks tomorrow. Will enough of those people be willing to pay $7 per month to get back their prestigious checkmark? I, for one, will not.
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