The Endgame for AI-generated Writing

“What will the internet look like when it is populated to a greater extent by soulless material devoid of any real purpose or appeal?” wrote Atlantic senior technology editor Damon Beres this week.

Beres’s concern is that media corporations less scrupulous than his own are beginning to pollute the internet with cheap, machine-synthesized content. He argues we’re headed towards a dystopian future that looks an awful lot like the dead-internet conspiracy theory, which posits that most of the people and content we see in our feeds are fakes—created by an evil AI to manipulate us into buying stuff we don’t need and consuming information that isn’t true so that advertisers can reach us.

On what fact pattern is Beres basing his projections? His article names two recent developments.

The first is BuzzFeed’s announcement that it will use AI to create personalized quizzes (e.g., “Answer 7 Simple Questions and AI Will Write a Song About Your Ideal Soulmate”).

The second is CNET’s experiment using AI to generate SEO-optimized explainer articles, such as “What is an Annual Percentage Yield?,” some of which apparently contained significant inaccuracies and plagiarism.

One writer employed by CNET’s parent company, Red Ventures, wrote an anonymous op-ed that reveals just how deep anxiety over AI-generated text runs:

I wonder about what the future will be like for my children. I wonder if they’ll have the same dreams of being a writer like I did when I was young. I wonder if that job will even be there when they grow up. Twenty years from now, will they cut their teeth on freelancing, learning and developing their style and getting their beat? Or will it all be dried up? Will the door be closed forever, the ladder pulled up behind us, the last writers, our words used to feed the ever-starving algorithm?

Later in the op-ed, the anonymous writer predicts the same dystopian future that Beres did: