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Medium bans AI-generated content from its paid Partner Program

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

#41

Post by wredue »

barfbagginus wrote: post #25
aldarisbm wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question... Why? I understand that medium is not absolutely necessary and ideally we would have an open source tool that is easy to deploy. In the meanwhile, I use medium quite a bit.

When we use medium, we tell our audience we don't care if they get bombarded with bad UX, like subscription popups. And we tell our accessibility activist audience that we don't want them to read us at all. I immediately nope out of medium articles. I black list medium on my search engines. And I criticize medium authors on HN instead of reading their articles. This is all with the hope of bringing back more accessib…

Yeah. Medium did help to consolidate searching for blogs, but it also vastly increased the extremely low effort, and encourages bringing hot garbage takes to the spotlight.

I have yet to find a technical writer on medium that isn’t basically musing about what they learned that day in boot camp, or just regurgitating some stupidity they just read about how “FP is totally actually extremely performant if you just squint really really hard while lying about numbers!”

The bar for “good” on medium is already so insanely low that I question their move here.

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

#42

Post by radarsat1 »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #10

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…

> Nobody is getting banned for the "Gray-AI" of assisted writing, where you get help with an outline

Maybe not but it's certainly worth worrying that this is what will happen just because the line has to be drawn somewhere and that's an easier way to draw it. Baby, bathwater, etc.

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

#43

Post by lelandfe »

barfbagginus wrote: post #19
lelandfe wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is not very clear about the case where the text is AI generated and substantially edited, fact checked, and improved by a human co-author. I think that kind of writing is perfectly valid. AI contexts can now include primary references, and with human critique, AI can fix a lot of its own style and factuality issues. A good author writing this way will end up writing in their own voice, but spend less time drafti…

I believe that would be, from my link, "AI-assistive." Such text would need "a disclosure at the beginning of the story (within the first two paragraphs)."

The reason given is, "in practice, AI-assist is often a way to insert small snippets of AI-generated content that often suffers from the same problems as fully AI- generated stories."

In other words, readers need a heads up that, no matter how well-edited the text is, there's a chance of hallucinated junk to be found within.

I'm sure I'm missing some edge cases, but this all seems pretty darn lucid to me!

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

#44

Post by AlwaysRock »

MSFT_Edging wrote: post #29
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #10

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 guess it depends on what you call making your money on writing. At one point, most of my money was from writing emails. I can't really spell and somehow my grammar is worse. LanguageTool, and whatever plug in/extension/google search copy and paste that I've previously used, allows me to communicate the same message but without spelling/grammar mistake many people would see.

There is almost no chance I'm going to spend a significant amount of time relearning grammar and how to spell. But that has almost nothing to do with my ability to communicate or make money writing. The grammar tools just translate my sentences into the format we've all agreed is correct. Almost like a linter but for English.

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

#45

Post by MSFT_Edging »

creesch wrote: post #37
MSFT_Edging wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

I think I may have been taking it too literally.

I read "writer feeds incoherent sentence into a tool", when it was probably an exaggeration.

The multi-lingual thing is also a good point.

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

#46

Post by dragonwriter »

MSFT_Edging wrote: post #29
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #10

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…

> Is it just me or is this a bizarre practice for someone who is actively making money on writing?

No, its not bizarre for paid writers to use tools that are a lower-overhead replacement for paid copy-editors when using a platform that's entire value is that it serves as a lower-overhead replacement for a publishing house but which also doesn't provide most of the things a publishing house would provide except distribution and payment processing.

It's really the most natural thing in the world. If AI was up to snuff for it, it wouldn't be surprisibg for Medium authors to use automated tools to function as editors (not merely copy editors) as well.

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

#47

Post by MSFT_Edging »

makeitdouble wrote: post #40
MSFT_Edging wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think I was taking the original comment too literally, but I still don't think this comparison applies.

Tools to rewrite basic sentence structure requires a lack of sentence structure in the first place. It's like needing a tool to make your foo-bar run.

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

#48

Post by MSFT_Edging »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #44
MSFT_Edging wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 guess it depends on what you call making your money on writing. At one point, most of my money was from writing emails. I can't really spell and somehow my grammar is worse. LanguageTool, and whatever plug in/extension/google search copy and paste that I've previously used, allows me to communicate the same message but without spelling/grammar mistake many people would see. There is almost no chance I'm going to sp…

This use-case makes a lot more sense.

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

#49

Post by MSFT_Edging »

aftbit wrote: post #33
MSFT_Edging wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What about the argument of using the AI to create an outline? Surely spelling has no effect on the outline if you understand the concept? The outline isn't being published, it's just the author laying out their thoughts on a topic that they're claiming to have some authority in.

If the author cannot outline their ideas, even with bad grammar and spelling, do they actually understand the concept?

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

#50

Post by monkpit »

red_admiral wrote: post #31
Verdex wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://xkcd.com/810/
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