The lack of quality is what gets to me. I've used AI tools in many aspects of my life to great benefit. Yet, nowadays scrolling through Reddit, X, or even video based platforms are a deluge of drivel. It was bad enough that I was spending too much time on my phone instead of interacting with other people but now even the content I'm interacting with isn't human!

More and more I find myself opening Youtube or Reddit and just closing because the information just seems low. It is either me or some sort of mass debasement of entropy is happening. Actually, good.

Are you saying that now, because of all the AI generated content online, you're suddenly willing to pay for sites like Wired, NatGeo, Popular Mechanics, MIT Tech Review or The Economist? These have been around for ages. Why now, and not before?

I'm curious because GenAI might actually help traditional media orgs that still hire humans to write. They just need to move away from hard or metered paywalls and move toward a token model (something less common but growing). Let people buy credits to unlock individual articles instead of forcing a full subscription. Some Substack newsletters are already trying pay-per-post.

(Note: I got downvoted for including a US newspaper as an example. I'm not from the US, it was just a random example. I've removed it to avoid unnecessary polarisation.)

Speaking as someone who usually has newspaper subscriptions:

Why do you think those publishers are going to avoid using AI?

Because they're in the business of producing original, quality content. That's why they charge a fee. Their whole model depends on real people writing articles. The moment they stop doing that is the moment they start losing subscribers.

Using AI doesn't automatically mean content is no longer original and qualitative, no more than using an online dictionary or grammar check does.

Your comment is misleading.

1. LLMs aren't like grammar checkers or translation tools, just like they're not calculators. They can handle far more complex tasks.

2. AI might be powerful, but it can't create anything original. It relies entirely on human-generated data. Without data, LLMs are completely useless.

If the content is AI generated, it explicitly does.

Think about it, would you rather listen to a Spotify AI generated piano solo? Or Donna Summer's 1978 Album "On the Radio"?

AI content is slop, plain and simple and there's no way around it. I would expect a literal child to produce better content than even the most advanced AI models available.

That doesn't mean that AI is bad - it's very, very good at certain things. But media and art are uniquely human creations - if you remove the human part, what are you left with? Is it surprising that something Sora is producing isn't really comparable to The Devil Wears Prada?

Now, if you create content and then slightly edit it with an AI, that's fine. But if, say, the NYT shifted to all AI generated stuff, they would go out of business remarkably fast.

What you're saying doesn't really pan. If the work is pleasing, there's no preference. And I've seen a couple of articles in the last several months where humans thought that AI-generated works of art were created by humans. And the quality will only improve over time. Eventually it'll be the case that the only way to tell something was generated by AI is by labeling it as such.

> If the work is pleasing, there's no preference.

Okay, but it's not.

> And I've seen a couple of articles in the last several months where humans thought that AI-generated works of art were created by humans.

Yes, and there's also human created works of art that are three blue stripes on a white canvas.

Look, If I poll 1000 people, how many would rather listen to AI music rather than their favorite artist? 1, if I'm lucky?

After a certain point we have to acknowledge what is actually going on, here in real life where real humans lives, and put aside what we think might be going on. People, currently, do not like AI music or AI TV or whatever the fuck. They just don't.

I would definitely not. The pricing is outrageous when you consider that I'll read at most a few articles per year from an individual source. And at least the NYT is a borderline scam organization with how much more difficult it is to unsubscribe than it is to subscribe.

Try ground news? It aggregates everything about a particular story shows you all sides. Even has a low tier at $2.99 a month. I knew of another one that lets you subscribe to a bunch of papers for a lower price point but I forgot the name of it.

I think “balance” is a flawed goal, when what people actually need to interpret the news is context. Since their methodology is almost certainly based on heuristics rather than an editor with any underlying philosophy or education, these sites that try to show things from all sides can end up being just another level of obfuscation rather than contributing toward understanding.

But does Ground News also let you read the articles?? Like from the NYT for example.

It’s sad that a proper payment system was never developed for this kind of content. I’d be perfectly happy to pay $x/month for all the news I get, but I won’t sign up for an ongoing subscription to a site I might only look at once.

I agree. If you're a large media org, the best way to monetise articles is to let people browse for free and buy tokens, one token per article. The more they read, the more tokens they buy, and if they're spending $30 a month the site says, "Hey, why not subscribe for $29.99 a month and get unlimited access?"

Problem is enough persons likely won't be fading enough to get to that threshold, and the business isn't sustainable on tokens. The model is inherently broken.

True. I know of a company that added a pay‑as‑you‑go option. In the first year, more people signed up, but over time subscriptions dropped, so they scrapped it.

That said, pay‑per‑post is becoming more popular, and platforms like Substack are already experimenting with it.

What if I want good human content.

I think it's really easy for people to say that the dive in quality is due to AI. I actually think it's the other way around.

I'm in my late 40s and I've been watching quality decrease in our discourse and media for decades. And I think AI is just another opportunity for them to find a way to further reduce costs. But the incentive to reduce costs is there and it's a result of market demand for convenience and low cost above all else, and it's there regardless of whether or not AI is involved.

And so I think you're asking probably the most salient question: if you're looking for high quality content, where do you go? For me, personally, I've found that people generally are not producing high-quality content for commercial gain. So I've just gotten a lot more community-focused in recent years.

I was making a joke that The Economist is garbage content, but also genAI content is also garbage.

Yeah, I think I caught on to a little bit of that in your comment, which is why I started talking about the dynamic that just because you're paying a legacy publication doesn't mean you can avoid AI. It sort of a case where there's an unlimited number of ways to produce garbage content and really only one way to produce excellent content.

Good point.

There are plenty of paid options out there, WIRED, Popular Mechanics, MIT Tech Review. Or any of these newsletters https://www.bigtechnology.com/recommendations

I think there is a decent likelihood that the publications and publishers in general will use AI to decrease the reliance on artists and writers. The most obvious outcome here is that we're going to be consuming AI content no matter what. It's just a question of who's going to be getting paid for it.

This is not my idea. It's a concept that Rick Beato pointed out in his videos analyzing music production today and the direction it's going between the artists and the record labels. Everybody wants to be doing less work, and so the argument is really over who gets to control the technology and get paid.

If you want my honest opinion, GenAI is definitely going to change how we write and consume information:

- Original, quality content will still exist, and it'll still need to be paid for, either monthly or per article.

- Right now, articles are written by journalists. In the near future, a single article might be written by several people who aren't journalists at all, but still get paid. An AI will handle fact-checking and composition. The opinions, ideas, and knowledge will come from humans, AI will just verify and stitch it together.

I said good content.

How did you get it before AI?

Google, usually.

Opening you mouth is one thing, opening your wallet is another