> Blogspam and corporate blogs had killed quality bogs ages ago even before AI was a thing.That was a two-pronged thing. As well as the blog-spam drowning out what good blogs there were, a lot of people that used to output that way moved to centralised platforms that then either tried to lock their content in, or surrounded it with ad-tech bothers, or both.
> if an AI generated article is indistinguishable from a human written article…
Quite a bit of AI generated output is indistinguishable from crap human writing, often mediocre human writing, and that is actually part of the problem. A lot of people bang something out of their LLM/agents of choice and not bother taking the time needed to lift to good or excellent, so there is a bulk of mediocre or worse stuff flooding the medium because it is so easy to produce. But do we really need 100+ mediocre articles and a few good ones on a subject where there would previously have been a few mediocre ones and still a few good+ ones? It makes the genuinely worthwhile content much harder to stumble upon, especially as the ones taking the lazier approaches to writing seem to be making greater efforts in self-promotion with the time they have saved!
> if an AI generated article is […] is accurate and interesting, do you care who wrote it?
Firstly: maybe not, or at least less so. But I'm not convinced they can be trusted to be that accurate. I don't trust the average human that much either, they are often authoritatively wrong too (which doesn't help the LLMs, which have been at least partially trained on authoritatively wrong content), but I trust good human writers (who may be assisted by LLMs these days, like they've been assisted by spelling & grammar checkers for decades) above other human writers and content almost entirely drawn from LLMs.
Secondly: Yes. I care. I'm still smarting that after years of people being fined heavily, banned from things, and even imprisoned, for copying content, we seem fine with the big companies pirating whatever they want for training purposes⁰. Yes, some fines have been paid, but a few hours worth of income isn't even a slap on the wrist given how much funny money is being sloshed around the sector ATM, and do you know any content makers who got a share of those fines? I'm still trying to avoid being a part of that, to the point of being willing to commit career suicide¹, so yes, I do care who/what made most effort on creating the article. Given a choice between human, human with LLM assist, LLM with minimal human editing, and purer slop, I would morally prefer something from as close to the “just humans” end of the scale over anything else, even if the quality is practically identical.
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[0] I wonder how the corporates would take the “we only downloaded and used it ignoring the licence for model training purposes” point being used about their output. After all, I'm only using it irrespective of your licence to train the intelligence model that sits between my ears!
[1] The current corporate overlords have as much said “get with AI or be left behind”, and I'm sure being left behind will involve being PIPed out to pasture. I might be able to argue “the difference is enough to be considered a material change in roll, so you can't force that under UK employment law nor sack me for not playing ball”, but the same change-of-roll argument just opens up the possibility of redundancy instead², which is only marginally better. In either case I'm done for working in development with my current attitudes.
[2] this interpretation, if not legal pigswill entirely, also makes “we need less legacy developers and more agenic developers, your legacy roll is therefore redundant, do you want to change to an agent-based job or do you want to leave?” perfectly legal.