Yes, the darling of the error-filled Star Wars listicle is back at it, doubling down on bot content.
This piece has plenty of appropriately harsh critique and references to all my favorite actually-published AI-generated stories, but there's also something new! I was intrigued by G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller's reference of his time at Forbes.com, where external content like wires etc was a big part of the site:
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.
The thing that makes wire content so nice, though, is that it shows up ready to publish. Hallucination-prone AI content, on the other hand, has to pass through a human for even basic checks. If you're somehow producing 25x as much content using AI, you're going to need a similar multiplier on your editor headcount (which we all know isn't on the menu).