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Medium bans AI-generated content from its paid Partner Program

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31–40 of 62 posts

Re: Medium bans AI-generated content from its paid Partner Program

#31
post #15

All publishers are grappling with this where they want generally higher quality content (defined as more engaging, intrinsic quality is something else) and less low effort spam or retreaded concepts. AI-generated content has really dropped the floor on how cheap it is to produce niche blogspam, and they're saying: "Hey if you're pushing out 1000s of articles a day on a topic and we look at it and it's insane gibberis…

I believe this to be the correct take away. They don't actually want to ban AI content. They want to ban garbage content. If they claim that something is AI content, then it's not like there's a good defense a writer can offer. Short of meticulously recording themselves typing the article up on a typewriter in real life ahead of time. In real time so everyone can see them going through revisions. This is AI and we're…

Indeed. xkcd 810 comes to mind.

Re: Medium bans AI-generated content from its paid Partner Program

#33

All publishers are grappling with this where they want generally higher quality content (defined as more engaging, intrinsic quality is something else) and less low effort spam or retreaded concepts. AI-generated content has really dropped the floor on how cheap it is to produce niche blogspam, and they're saying: "Hey if you're pushing out 1000s of articles a day on a topic and we look at it and it's insane gibberis…

> use Grammarly Pro to rewrite your sentences into coherence Is it just me or is this a bizarre practice for someone who is actively making money on writing? Like, shouldn't you be expected to at least have competence in your craft? Writing with correct grammar should be the baseline of someone writing for profit. Or even "help with an outline", if you can't write an outline of what you're trying to communicate, and…

I think it's just you. That's like saying you should know how to spell perfectly if you're a professional writer, and should not use spell check. LLMs are just spell check on steroids.

Re: Medium bans AI-generated content from its paid Partner Program

#34

All publishers are grappling with this where they want generally higher quality content (defined as more engaging, intrinsic quality is something else) and less low effort spam or retreaded concepts. AI-generated content has really dropped the floor on how cheap it is to produce niche blogspam, and they're saying: "Hey if you're pushing out 1000s of articles a day on a topic and we look at it and it's insane gibberis…

> use Grammarly Pro to rewrite your sentences into coherence Is it just me or is this a bizarre practice for someone who is actively making money on writing? Like, shouldn't you be expected to at least have competence in your craft? Writing with correct grammar should be the baseline of someone writing for profit. Or even "help with an outline", if you can't write an outline of what you're trying to communicate, and…

Exactly, tools like this help bring your writing up to "average", if you're making a living writing, you should already be much better than that. It's kind of like a painter using a "paint by numbers" canvas.

Re: Medium bans AI-generated content from its paid Partner Program

#35
post #28

All publishers are grappling with this where they want generally higher quality content (defined as more engaging, intrinsic quality is something else) and less low effort spam or retreaded concepts. AI-generated content has really dropped the floor on how cheap it is to produce niche blogspam, and they're saying: "Hey if you're pushing out 1000s of articles a day on a topic and we look at it and it's insane gibberis…

The real issue isn't 'insane gibberish', because that's quickly and cheaply discernible. The real issue is eloquent, well written text that looks like a new contribution but is actually a re-hashed mixture of the same six talking points as the other 1000 articles published by the same entity, because you have to actually read and think about it to realise that it's wasted your time. We're not fighting against random…

Even so, if the paradigm shift occurs most of us will be summarizing the manufactured pap via an LLM. Our time won’t be wasted in that case.

No clue how this all ends, but I can’t see any reason for websites to exist anymore. We’ll be going from one black prompt screen LLM with a Reddit logo on the top left, to another tab with the same LLM with a Medium logo on the top left.

Seems pointless, just combine it and list the sources.

Re: Medium bans AI-generated content from its paid Partner Program

#36

All publishers are grappling with this where they want generally higher quality content (defined as more engaging, intrinsic quality is something else) and less low effort spam or retreaded concepts. AI-generated content has really dropped the floor on how cheap it is to produce niche blogspam, and they're saying: "Hey if you're pushing out 1000s of articles a day on a topic and we look at it and it's insane gibberis…

> use Grammarly Pro to rewrite your sentences into coherence Is it just me or is this a bizarre practice for someone who is actively making money on writing? Like, shouldn't you be expected to at least have competence in your craft? Writing with correct grammar should be the baseline of someone writing for profit. Or even "help with an outline", if you can't write an outline of what you're trying to communicate, and…

I don't really care about grammar so long as the point is communicated. Some people are trying to write in a non-native language, or just need a bit of help. Whatever tooling that helps improve communication is great, I think the content is more important than the language used to communicate it.

Also your point could be made equally well about people using spellcheck.

Re: Medium bans AI-generated content from its paid Partner Program

#37

All publishers are grappling with this where they want generally higher quality content (defined as more engaging, intrinsic quality is something else) and less low effort spam or retreaded concepts. AI-generated content has really dropped the floor on how cheap it is to produce niche blogspam, and they're saying: "Hey if you're pushing out 1000s of articles a day on a topic and we look at it and it's insane gibberis…

> use Grammarly Pro to rewrite your sentences into coherence Is it just me or is this a bizarre practice for someone who is actively making money on writing? Like, shouldn't you be expected to at least have competence in your craft? Writing with correct grammar should be the baseline of someone writing for profit. Or even "help with an outline", if you can't write an outline of what you're trying to communicate, and…

It is bizarre if you don't take it quite literally. In practice, it is possible, even for seasoned writers, to sometimes create sentences that could use a bit of attention. If Grammarly is the right tool for that can be debated, but that is the case for any tool.

I feel like your response is along the lines of "programmers shouldn't use syntax highlighting" and similar arguments against tooling.

Then there are also the folks out there who want to publish their writings in English, but for who English is not their native language. They might use sentence structures that don't work quite as well in English as they do in their native language.

Re: Medium bans AI-generated content from its paid Partner Program

#38
post #7

> Any story using AI help must clearly mention this within the first two paragraphs. What’s AI here? Is the spelling correction tool in Google Docs "AI"? Are the suggestions from my iPhone "AI"? This is the kind of very vague sentence written by someone who doesn’t understand AI.

https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/22576852947223-Art... > We define AI-generated writing as writing where the majority of the content has been created by an AI-writing program with little or no edits, improvements, fact-checking, or changes. This does not include AI writing tools such as AI outlining, or AI assisted fact, spelling, or grammar checkers > Do I need to disclose the use of AI-assistance such as g…

Thanks; it’s not very clear that "AI help" excludes "AI-assistance".

Re: Medium bans AI-generated content from its paid Partner Program

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>AI-generated content has really dropped the floor on how cheap it is to produce niche blogspam For all the potential good utility AI has, my current outlook is that it's primarily going to be used as a noise-generator at scale. As long as there's money (or influence) to be had from clicks and advertisement, the near-zero cost of AI-generated content means people will take advantage of that arbitrage opportunity.

On the bright side we’ve desperately needed a noise filter for, like, a decade or so. At least these LLMs are a big noticeable discontinuity to make the problem obvious.

On the gloomier side, if we couldn't come up with a good noise filter in the relatively calm times of the pre-LLM era, are we going to find something now?

Re: Medium bans AI-generated content from its paid Partner Program

#40

All publishers are grappling with this where they want generally higher quality content (defined as more engaging, intrinsic quality is something else) and less low effort spam or retreaded concepts. AI-generated content has really dropped the floor on how cheap it is to produce niche blogspam, and they're saying: "Hey if you're pushing out 1000s of articles a day on a topic and we look at it and it's insane gibberis…

> use Grammarly Pro to rewrite your sentences into coherence Is it just me or is this a bizarre practice for someone who is actively making money on writing? Like, shouldn't you be expected to at least have competence in your craft? Writing with correct grammar should be the baseline of someone writing for profit. Or even "help with an outline", if you can't write an outline of what you're trying to communicate, and…

Applying your argument to coding, it would be about writing near perfect code without autocomplete, boilerplate templates, and be able to cleanly match types without static analysis or the compiler yelling after us.

That's a nice ideal to strive for, but that wouldn't make us all better programmers or not worth actively getting paid for programming.

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