A few weeks ago some voices in the US media revealed that the tech site CNET was using an AI to automatically generate content every morning. What was surprising from the start was that these daily publications were about mortgage rates. Content that seems out of place on a site that offers reviews of tech and computer equipment. But for CNET’s parent company, Red Ventures, this SEO-optimized content is the key. Indeed, the principle is simple: publish content designed to rank well by Google for queries, then monetize that traffic with lucrative affiliate links. Thanks to AI, CNET aims to saturate the Google search algorithm with content, reduce the cost of creating said content and ultimately increase the profit generated by each click. But since this “revelation”, the parent company of this media has decided to move up a gear… Because to better reduce costs, it is unquestionably necessary to remove the human.
When AI replaces the editor…
According to The Verge, the company that oversees CNET has just made massive layoffs. Their sources indicate that the layoffs would affect about 10% of the editorial staff. Should we just focus on CNET and tell ourselves that we are all very far from this problem? Actually, no. The tech press in general has a long history of bad habits. The ones of using press releases and reviewer guides that brands provide when a new product is released by paraphrasing. Under these conditions, why use a human? An AI will collect hundreds of articles and can rewrite them to look like a single piece of content in seconds. An editor supervises the whole thing and that’s it…Let’s go to the end, some are already doing it, you just have to compare the amount of content published daily by some media and the size of their team to understand. The low cost and ease with which these tools can generate content has led some to predict that the phenomenon will quickly pollute search engine results and social networks with text designed solely to drive someone to a specific product or website. When some people refer to a catchy title (and we sometimes do) as a “click whore”, they will quickly have to adapt their vocabulary…
