Who Benefits from AI-Generated Content?

By Dustin Rowles | Social Media | July 6, 2023 |

By Dustin Rowles | Social Media | July 6, 2023 |

I know this is obvious, but it’s worth asking in light of the AV Club Bot, the Gizmodo Bot, and the various other AI-generated listicles on the Internet: just who benefits from this content, exactly? In the case of the AV Club and Gizmodo, it’s Jim Spanffeller and the owners of G/O Media, people who have no relationship with the content created. Because it is bot created, they don’t even technically own the content.

In other words, no writers benefit because it is not written by a human, and no readers benefit, because there is no value to the content. Someone typed in “Create a Chronological List of Star Wars Movies & TV Shows” into ChatGPT and copy-pasted the list into their content management system, added a header image, and hit publish. That’s it.

This content does not exist to entertain or inform. It has no value except as a digital page that can be crawled by search engines and clicked on by unsuspecting readers who will not realize until after G/O Media has collected the ad revenue that the page is worthless. A reader would be better off typing “Create a Chronological List of Star Wars Movies & TV Shows” into ChatGPT themselves. The information produced would lack insight, but the readers would at least avoid the extra click and the intrusive ads.

Businesses must often make difficult decisions to save themselves. It is sometimes necessary to throw someone overboard to keep the ship from sinking. That is understandable — I’d rather have a functioning company with 5 writers than a company with 10 writers that goes bankrupt. However, that presupposes there are employees who benefit from the company’s continued existence. Who could be interested in reading worthless copy to benefit not the company and its employees but owners who do not otherwise contribute to the value of the content produced? AI-generated articles are a grift, largely designed to enrich people who are already wealthy for doing next to nothing. I find little else more abhorrent than a person who has plenty but deprives someone else who does the work of their well-being to give themselves more for doing nothing. It is morally unacceptable, cartoon supervillain stuff, and anyone involved deserves to be shamed to the ends of the Internet.