Hey, creators. It's time to get really good at what you do. And by good, I mean original, thoughtful, experienced -- and willing to show you have a soul.
Because the soulless army of A.I. avatars is coming for your job. Hard.
About six months ago, I wrote a piece assuring most folks that A.I. wasn't going to eliminate their jobs but I made sure to extend a warning to one particular at-risk group.
Yes. You product-pimping writers, you stock footage video knitters, and 99.5 percent of you influencers. Generative A.I. is already eating your lunch.
The algorithms are now pumping out "people" who are better looking than we are, with more fashionable back stories than us, and a far better grasp of SEO-driven content than we could ever hope to have -- because it's already working on the inside, partnering with its search algorithm cousins to sell way more foot massagers and rug-pull crypto investments than we could ever dream of.
But I don't blame you. I blame Sports Illustrated.
Oh, and I blame myself. Because I kind of helped start the whole thing.
Another Major Media Outlet Gets Outed for Using A.I.
An article (human-written, I hope) in Futurism last week dove deep into the alleged use of generative A.I. by Sports Illustrated's parent company, the Arena Group, which also bought The Street from Jim Cramer, by the way.
It seems that SI contracted a third-party company to create promotional product review content for its website. That third party, it's alleged, used A.I.-generated authors, with A.I.-generated bios and headshots, to write A.I.-generated content for said promotional product reviews.
They got caught. Like Gannett.
I'm not even going to debate the generative A.I. angle here. Because, as I said six months ago, generative A.I. is just the shitty solution to the greater problem -- the problem of low-quality content creators, and in this case, low-quality content publishers, barfing out SEO-driven words to sell foot-massagers and crypto scams.
It's not the fact that this content exists--it's the fact that it's justified. And that justification is going to be the number one backlash against generative A.I. We're not "giving the people what they want," we're just using that as an excuse for deceptive marketing practices and barely ethical sales tactics.
Telling me that "Drew Ortiz" has "spent most of his life outdoors" is no different than assuring me that his recommendation is based on his experience using the product outdoors -- instead of just made-up content from someone who has never set foot outdoors. Or even has a foot.
Sports Illustrated Was a Content Institution
This hits especially close to home for me. For one, and this is showing my age, I used to subscribe to Sports Illustrated as a kid, and I grew up reading gold from people like ... OK, let's face it, Frank Deford is the only one I can remember. But trust me, it was once the undisputed champion of sports-related content the world over.
But also, I was half the brain trust behind Automated Insights. Which started as StatSheet. Which produced the first commercially available A.I.-generated content. In sports. In 2010. We covered all the pro and college big three sports teams and even cranked out Yahoo Fantasy Football recaps. We got acquired by a private equity firm in 2015.
So yeah, I'm going to go down like Stephen Falken in WarGames, hiding on an island somewhere while the world blows itself up over a game of Tic-Tac-Toe I coded.
In all seriousness, you can see where I land on both sides of this issue. As the internet gets more soaked with ever-increasing mounds of data, it's becoming much more difficult to synthesize that data into meaningful insight. Thus, the name change of our company to Automated Insights. We weren't trying to replace writers, because, at the highest levels, A.I. is not good at that. Mechanically, yes. The thoughtful soul-having part? Not one bit.
We were trying to replace data scientists, and we were successful at that. We crunched data into words that could relate the what of the event, not the why. Gen-A.I., for all its magic, still isn't very good at the why. Will it be someday? Maybe. But it isn't now.
So even if, even if, we accept the premise of using an institutional brand to sell content real estate to foot massager manufacturers to publish questionable reviews with affiliate links, the writer is supposed to tell us why we should buy that foot massager, based on their experience with this particular foot massager and many other foot massagers.
I'm just saying I want some podiatry with my review. This use case gives generative A.I. a terrible, awful, not-very-good name.
Baring My Human Soul
On the flip side, I'm also a creator. I write a lot, I do videos now, and before I became an entrepreneur I was on my way to being a full-time rock star (at least in my misguided future vision). And when I sit down to create something, my primary intention is to create something good.
Man, I know advertising has always blurred the lines between creating for the sake of art and creating for the sake of commerce. I'm not naive enough to believe that the former can exist without the latter, but I'm also not jaded enough to believe we should accept the latter without any hint of the former.
"Good" content from generative A.I. is not free. It's not even cheap -- a hard fact that OpenAI is having to come to grips with pretty quickly now. Admittedly, SI stopped paying for the Frank Deford level of quality content decades ago. And maybe Gen-Z or the next wave of kids after them is going to fully embrace the notion of trusting an attractive avatar with their life decisions.
But there is data aggregation, which is fine. There is an automated recommendation, which is fine. And then there's duping millions of people into thinking A.I. has a soul.
That's wrong. And the creator in me will die on that hill.
BY JOE PROCOPIO, FOUNDER, TEACHINGSTARTUP.COM@JPROCO
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