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dave's avatar

Can you let it write headlines and introductions for future articles, therefore even reduce the ideas you have to come up with?

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DanT's avatar

Could there also be a big unintended consequence that not many people seem to have thought about?

Hypothetically, say Buzzfeed or a new media company can churn out 5 times as much content with the same resource (or less). So that's 5 times as many pages competing for eyeballs in an environment with low advertising rates because people already have too much to consume in a day... So it's unlikely to increase their revenue longterm. Which is why so many media companies are already looking at alternatives (subscriptions, email newsletters, podcasts, eCommerce etc).

And then there's the unintended consequence of wide AI adoption.

If I pay for a book, magazine or newspaper, I'm not just buying the content. I'm buying the labour of the people involved, who have spent time learning their craft, and researching their stories. So it's a fair exchange for me to pay for a book by William Gibson, for example, because I know at the end of the financial chain some of the money will be going to a person who has invested time and effort into the creation of the product I've bought.

If the only human input is five minutes spent on a headline and intro, which will probably then just be spun into multiple variations for testing purposes, why would I assign a monetary value to it? There's no labour to be rewarded, and no bond with the writer (which is a big driver of me spending money on writing). Instead it's just some very clever AI churning out words which are meaningless to it.

Rather than saving content companies cash, it seems more likely to entirely devalue writing as medium, which has pretty big implications for the how humanity communicates in the future.

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