If there’s one thing I’ve been taught since a young age, it is that any AI company with multiple capital letters in their name, like SkyNet and ChatGPT, should not be trusted. And now my lack of trust in these companies is at an all-time high.
Ok, realistically big giant robots won’t be shooting lasers and crushing skulls as seen in the gruesome beginning to The Terminator movie. But they will be taking over writing, education, and art in the modern world—which is just as bad as if they literally eliminated the human race considering how important these factors are to us in our daily lives.
Even companies that prioritize good writing have started turning towards AI to write stories for them: most notably, Sports Illustrated.
Sports Illustrated got caught red handed using AI generated staff profiles and AI generated writing to produce content on their website by Futurism writer Maggie Harrison Dupre. Sneaky sneaky!
It doesn’t take a keen eye to see that the staff profile (which has been taken down since) for one “Drew Ortiz” is AI generated hogwash. The profile read as follows: “Drew likes to say that he grew up in the wild, which is partially true. He grew up in a farmhouse, surrounded by woods, fields, and a creek. Drew has spent much of his life outdoors, and is excited to guide you through his never-ending list of the best products to keep you from falling to the perils of nature. Nowadays, there is rarely a weekend goes by where Drew isn’t out camping, hiking, or just back on his parents’ farm.”
This “Drew Ortiz” character wasn’t the only fictitious character on the Sports Illustrated staff. In fact, there were several AI-generated men and women that aren’t real at all. Needless to say, these articles were not good either. Most were ridden with mistakes, and contained words and phrases so bland they could represent the color “beige.”
Sports Illustrated isn’t the only publication using AI to produce content, many publications under SI’s parent company, The Arena Group, have done the same. This includes The Street and Men’s Journal. CNET, who’s parent company is Red Ventures, had also been caught using AI to produce content for them according to The Byte. Although CNET’s fiasco was not as egregious as Sports Illustrated’s (as the big aspect of Sports Illustrated is that they make their money and get their views for quality writing), it still demonstrates mistrust between companies and their consumers.
The use of AI in companies that should rely on good writing is downright nasty. AI rarely creates good pieces of work (we’ve all read those classic ChatGPT essays that sound mundane and robotic.) All of this likely reverts back to writers wanting better pay, and companies refusing to pay it. After all, who really wants to pay writers a living wage when you can pay them the bare minimum? Right? I mean, why pay writers enough to feed their families when you can pay some tech jabroni millions of dollars to provide their God-awful software to you? I think the answer’s obvious.
Long story short, the AI apocalypse is upon us. AI is everywhere, and it’s starting to make an impact on what we see. AI is even present in commercials and marketing. This use of AI takes away from the human element of advertisements… I mean, a robot is quite literally writing these commercials for them.
So, I think it’s safe to say that we should call this bad boy a DEFCON Five, call it quits, and let AI take us over like Arnold Schwarzenegger. OR we could just go back to using classic human ingenuity and our brains (fun fact, we’re born with those) to produce content that people will genuinely want to read. I know it’s a difficult scenario, though, so perhaps we should take some time to think on it.
