AI Slop Infiltrated American Newspaper Articles. 9% of them, to be exact.
A recent analysis of 1500 American newspapers finds the overall rate of fully AI-written articles a shocking 5%, and “mixed” another 4%, for a total of 9%. The rate was higher for articles about technology - no surprise! (16%) and health - no good! (12%).
ON JANUARY 10, 2024, at a US Senate hearing titled "AI and The Future Of Journalism," Senator Blumenthal sounded the alarm.
“First, Meta, Google and OpenAI are using the hard work of newspapers and authors to train their AI models without compensation or credit… those models are then used to compete with newspapers and broadcasters,” he said.
He was right. Today, journalism is experiencing an existential crisis due to a singular threat: AI.
We used to do a google search for a topic and then click on the news article that comes up. Not anymore. The AI summary at the top of the page is often enough, and people don’t do the extra “click” to get to the news story. This is a media company’s nightmare - “zero click search.”
As a result, internet traffic to top US newspapers is down 45% in the last four years. MSN, CNN, Fox News and others are seeing 30-40% drops in traffic.
And when traffic drops, so does revenue. Over 100 US newspapers closed since last year, leading to local news deserts. The number of newspaper journalists shrunk from over 360,000 in 2005 to about 90,000 today. Reporter and journalist jobs are expected to decline for years to come.
And it’s not just the external threat from big tech. AI-created contents is already infiltrating and undermining the media from within.
The other day I asked ChatGPT, “How much material in the news media is written by AI?”
I was prompted by personal experience working with a PR agent at a top global agency, Sam (not their real name) on placing an Op Ed. “Your piece is great, but I revised it to make it clearer and shorter,” Sam wrote. Strange, I thought. The piece was completely rewritten. Not a single sentence remained intact. Then it hit me. “Wow, incredible! Makes me wonder if you used ChatGPT? I mean it as a compliment,” I texted Sam, worried that if I guessed wrong, they would be offended.
“Haha…We use something similar and more powerful,” Sam responded. “Our proprietary AI tool that we use to help us with editing and writing combines ChatGPT and other platforms. We wouldn’t just say, “rewrite this article.” You won’t get a very good output. To get a quality output requires smart, extensive direction, including drafting a version yourself, or at least an extensive outline with an explicit prompts on what you want the output to look like, then using your skill to continue editing and refining, re-running it through AI, and then refining some more, and so on until you get what you need… Almost all professional writers — both in media and PR — are using it to some extent.” (my highlight)
This is not a secret. The CEO of Omnicom, a giant media conglomerate, said recently that the company is using AI to “accelerate creative ideation.” “OmniAI, the agency’s in-house AI platform, provides teams with generative AI models for text, graphics, video and audio, trained for agency-specific use cases. The company is aiming to have every client-facing employee using OmniAI by the end of the year,” according to a recent report.
Sam and I agreed not to use AI with my work. All my writing here on ETPNews.com or elsewhere is 100% human.
But why is AI-written journalism a problem, anyway? The main reason, in my opinion, gets to the concept of “slop.”
“Slop” is an interesting word. Its original meaning was “human food scaps fed to animals,” or just “mud.” The term is still used in horse races to refer to muddy tracks after it rains, as famously portrayed by Kramer in Seinfeld: “"Oh this baby loves the slop, loves it, eats it up. Eats the slop. Born to slop.”
But “slop” also means “a product of no value,” as in, “watching the usual slop on TV.” The word “sloppy” comes from the same root.
In mid-2024, the term acquired a new use: “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.”
Max Spero, the CEO of a Brooklyn-based company called Pangram, is a world’s leading expert in AI slop. Pangram is a world leader in detecting it - a hugely important task. More on this below.
