Can't AI learn to wait for Halloween to bust out the spooky stuff like humans do?
The Unofficial Apple Weblog closed up shop around ten years ago. Its writers went on to bigger, better, animate websites and assumed, rightfully, that their work for TUAW would be archived somewhere or perhaps live on as a nice memory in techblog history.
Imagine the contributor's horror when TUAW came clawing back, mouth ajar, arm and ankle bent at unnatural angle, hungry and shuffling towards the prospect of increased algorithm engagement. And worse, with the very bylines of those same writers who had closed the coffin lid a decade prior, unaware that they should have padlocked the door lest something start banging on the coffin lid.
Worse, the new version of TUAW has "recreated" the archives of the site by running old, real articles through a summarization tool and then republishing new, "bastardized versions" of the old articles under the bylines of real writers who didn't actually write them, Warren said. The names and bios of dozens of real journalists who actually worked for TUAW a decade ago are listed on the website, and all of them have had their real images replaced with AI-generated ones, and their old work misattributed to other people and turned into AI slop by a summarization tool that has destroyed their original work.
[…]What has happened to TUAW and its writers is something of a nightmare scenario for journalists who work in an extremely precarious industry that has been marked with private equity takeovers, unceremonious layoffs, and the sale of once-proud brands to gambling moguls, AI-content farms, and SEO schemers. TUAW was originally a part of a company called Weblogs, Inc., which was later sold to AOL and was shut down by the company in February, 2015. It ended up in the hands of Yahoo, which was bought by Verizon, then sold to Apollo Global Management, a private equity firm.
JASON KOEBLER, 404MEDIA
Kill it with fire! Destroy the brain! Make zombies illegal! Do something, Shaun!
