It's hard to pin down exactly what I find so unsettling about the practice – it's almost like the uncanny valley, but for written content that apes human expression instead of imagery?
Might not be exactly this, but it makes me feel similar to why people hate advertising. Which I believe is, people don't like feeling lied-to, and everyone knows that marketers are trying to get in your head to manipulate you into manufacturing desire or stoking insecurity, all for the purposes of getting you to buy their products.
I think people like organic word-of-mouth, but on the flipside, hate when they find out that someone was a paid shill to posture as an average consumer, but are an industry plant to trick and deceive us all lol.
But to your point about why it feels icky and unsettling for publications & media companies to just straight-up use AI to write articles... seems kinda similar. Many of us are already skeptical that journalists & reporters are being censored and manipulated into writing with an agenda. But these types of AI-generated articles feels a few degrees more dehumanizing and Machiavellian. Like, the humanity aspect can all be aped so well, that we can just manipulate the masses and assuage their needs for a sense of connection without having any souls behind it whatsoever, because the masses are viewed as a bunch of manipulable "things" to simply extract things from (like attention).
I don't like it either, and for me it seems like it's those reasons. It feels so... gross and heartless.
One of the reasons I find so many ads annoying: the copy is complete shit. It's usually vapid, kitschy, cringy garbage. Most ads are like a Joss Wheadon show; formulaic, cookie-cutter "clever" that appeals to the simplest minds. Nobody talks like that in the real world.
It also usually feels like the creative process was supervised by a bunch of people who seem to think themselves a superior sort of human.
This type of behavior will only serve to cheapen content across the board. At this point, even the word "content" betrays the emptiness of it all - people don't pay for bags and boxes of "content" do they?
AI "content" is a nothing-burger. It is inherently devoid of "value" and seems like a last-ditch effort to squeegee the remaining drops of attention off of everyone's eyeballs without actually investing in genuine creativity.
As more and more of this dross floods the Internet, the very purpose of the web may be called into question. How can we share information with each other if the world's library/archive becomes the world's bot-poop landfill?
The Internet has evolved from a shared information system to so much more, so I hope this unfortunate phase will soon pass and ML tech can be put to more appropriate use than just crapping out low-effort "content" all over the place.
> At this point, even the word "content" betrays the emptiness of it all
In all fairness, "content" telegraphed that from the first time it was used in the online sense. I still don't understand why people are willing to use it to refer to their own work.
I'd be very, very curious to hear viable alternatives to ad supported models, that aren't based on how major companies have been doing it for the past 20 years (or longer?), where they make it free, then sneak in subscriptions, then over time, start increasing subscription costs.
I feel like it's not just the companies, but consumers/ audiences don't want to pay for most internet services unless it's something like infrastructure services where it somehow viscerally seems "sensible" and "right" to do so.
All those online services, even the AI ones, need servers and bandwidth and paid people to maintain them. They need sources of income and the only reliable one known to man (today) is ads. If you have a different idea, please do explain, but before you say "monthly contributions" think twice about the reality of it and maybe also count for how many services you personally pay. Of course one could say "why do I need online services at all" but that's not a future I care about.
The unsettling thing about it is that it's a lie from front to back, intended to deceive people into believing there are real people sharing recipes, when the people don't exist and nobody has ever eaten the food.
The opposite would be great: a web crawler that digests (pardon the pun) a 5mb web page (or 20m long-winded video) on how to cook a meal and condenses it into just the relevant steps and photos.
https://mela.recipes/ does this with its built-in browser/parser thing (and it has a bunch more incredibly useful stuff).
Highly recommended, it's from Silvio Rizzi of "Reeder" fame so it's a one-time purchase built with extreme care by a solo dev with excellent product instincts. Huge fan of his work, this kind of high-craftsmanship software is just so pleasant to use.
There is a whole slew of AI based video summarizing tools in existence already, enough so that a search for "video summarizer" has a bunch of listicles in the results.
It's hard to pin down exactly what I find so unsettling about the practice – it's almost like the uncanny valley, but for written content that apes human expression instead of imagery?