Last year both Gannett and Sports Illustrated were caught creating fake, “AI” generated journalists to create fake, plagiarism and mistake-prone “journalism.” In both instances the kind of brunchlord executives that fail upward at these kind of dying media companies thought it would be great to replace real human journalism with automated junk — without informing their actual human employees.
“AI” (not quite yet fully cooked language learning models) certainly have useful applications in journalism ranging from digging through court records to editing and transcription. But most tech and media execs instead see the tech primarily as a way to cut corners, undermine already underpaid labor, and create an automated and entirely mindless, low quality ad-engagement ouroboros that effectively shits money.
As it turns out, they’re having quite a bit of success.
At the heart of the SI and Gannett scandals was a company by the name of AdVon Commerce, which specializes in exactly this sort of lazy automation. The Verge has an interesting piece tracking the multi-year trajectory of the company (and its CEO Ben Faw), which was busy trying to scrub its presence off the internet after getting mired in scandal last year.
The Verge outlines how AdVon’s origins go back to at least 2018, when the company’s founder was already busily trying to demolish any sort of firewall between product reviews and marketing, helping turn that wing of the internet into a dodgy, pay-to-play industry of badly-automated dreck.
There’s the potential for regulatory action here, provided our regulators have the funds and resources and can outmaneuver a suite of recent Supreme Court rulings specifically designed to undermine them:
“If any of the Sports Illustrated or Gannett content featured clients that paid for placement in reviews, that financial relationship wasn’t clearly disclosed to readers — which, if true, would be a violation of Section 5 of the FTC Act, which prohibits “unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce.”
But so far, AdVon Commerce appears to be failing upward, and the closest they have gotten to “accountability” has been a lucrative new cloud partnership with Google.
For those of us who’ve been in the tech press for a long while, you can clearly look back and see the steady degradation of already shaky ethical norms and standards. It’s not too surprising that badly mismanaged, cash-strapped media companies (that think nothing about turning their entire websites into glorified blogspam affiliates on Amazon Prime day several times a year) might not have the soundest of standards to begin with.
But now you literally can’t go more than a few days without another story about a dodgy, badly automated news aggregation company run by sketchy individuals getting caught creating fake journalists and fake news to hoover up an outsized share of dwindling ad engagement money via the dullest, lowest quality clickbait imaginable.
It’s the sort of stuff that’s not only resulting in a less informed public, it’s draining resources and attention away from the dwindling number of actual journalists able to cobble together a career in journalism. People generally might applaud the collapse of a media system that has, admittedly, failed them for decades. But what’s replacing it is something decidedly worse.
What’s left is a bizarre media ecosystem comprised of influencers that fail to disclose marketing motivations, badly automated, and extremely error-prone aggregated pseudo-news, dodgy pink slime newspapers crafted by shifty partisan ratfuckers, AI scams and spam, and a bunch of feckless “both sides” mainstream news orgs owned by center-right billionaires with absolutely no idea what they’re doing.
That’s not so great news for people who enjoy things like deep analysis of complicated subjects, reviews that have some level of basic integrity, and smart journalism motivated by the public interest. But it’s fabulous news for the authoritarians who’ve built an incredibly well-funded alternative reality propaganda mill to redefine reality, undermine a shared collective reality forged by scientists, academics, and journalists, in a bid to justify the dismantling of what’s left of U.S. democracy.
There is, fortunately, a rising tide of independent newsletter authors and smaller journalist-owned news ventures still dedicated to something vaguely resembling the truth. But it’s not entirely clear they’ll be able to scale to meet the current moment, or survive a cavalcade of lawsuits by narcissistic manbaby billionaires that get extremely upset any time anybody tells the truth.
