Brown now says the next round of stories will receive input from the top editors at each publication. "We won't do another editorial project that I can possibly imagine, without an [editor-in-chief] overseeing and reviewing it," he told me.
Spanfeller and Brown also say they won't use AI to replace G/O's staff. "Our goal is to hire more journalists," Spanfeller said. (Spanfeller notes that, like other media companies — including Vox Media, which owns this site — G/O has laid off employees because of this "crappy economic market" — but called it a "de minimis amount of reduction.")
That argument doesn't persuade G/O staff, who say they assume G/O will inevitably use the tech to replace them.
"This is a not-so-veiled attempt to replace real journalism with machine-generated content," another G/O journalist told me. "G/O's MO is to make staff do more and more and publish more and more. It has never ceased to be that. This is a company that values quantity over quality."
Other newsrooms that have tried out AI-generated stories have since pulled back. CNET, which generated headlines when it admitted that dozens of stories it published were machine-made (and full of errors), has since said it won't use made-from-scratch AI stories. BuzzFeed, which briefly saw its stock shoot up when it announced its enthusiasm for AI earlier this year — and months later shut down its entire BuzzFeed News operation — produced an embarrassing series of "travel guides" that were almost entirely produced by AI. But a PR rep now says the company won't make more of those.
And while both Insider and Axios have said they are exploring using generative AI to help journalists do their work, executives at both publications say they won't use stories written entirely by bots. At the moment, at least.
"Definitely looking at every aspect of AI augmenting our work but don't see any upside in wholly AI-generated content right now," Axios editor-in-chief Jim VandeHei wrote in an email to Vox. "Seems like all danger, no upside until A LOT more is known."
But there's definitely at least one upside to machine-made content: It costs next to nothing. And it's worth noting that there are many, many outlets publishing stories, written by actual humans, that promise to tell you, as the Gizmodo AI story did, how to watch Star Wars movies in order. Among them: Space.com, Rotten Tomatoes, Reader's Digest, PC Magazine, the Wrap, and Vanity Fair.
And for at least a few days, Google ranked Gizmodo's machine-made output among the top results for "star wars movies" queries. That's something Brown noted when he told me that he's learned that AI content "will, at least for the moment, be well-received by search engines."
Which points out both the appeal and the limitations of this kind of stuff: There's some audience for it. And Google — for now — will steer people to sites that make it, which translates to page views and at least the potential for ad revenue.
But making the exact same content producible by dozens of other people — or an unlimited number of robots — doesn't build long-term value for your publication. And whatever financial return you earn will keep shrinking as more people and bots make the same thing, creating more competition and pushing ad prices down. (Unless, of course, Google decides that it's better off not sending people away from its results page at all — like it now does for "What time is the Super Bowl" results.)
It's also worth noting that the Gizmodo machine-made stories have since fallen way down on the Google rankings (perhaps because of the scrutiny those search results generated).
Years ago, I worked for Spanfeller when he was the publisher of Forbes.com, where he also produced a lot of content that wasn't created by his employees, like republished stories from news wires, consultancies, and other outside sources. Spanfeller estimates that his staff produced around 200 stories each day but that Forbes.com published around 5,000 items.
And back then, Spanfeller said, the staff-produced stories generated 85 to 90 percent of the site's page views. The other stuff wasn't valueless. Just not that valuable.
Spanfeller says he thinks that could play out again with AI stories, imagining a scenario where "there's value to the site, there's value to the end user for AI-generated content — whatever that means."
But he says the stuff the humans on his staff do will be much more valuable than the work the robots do. "I don't think this is an existential moment for journalism."
