157: AI plus publishing makes idiocracy. Is there a way out?

On our current trajectory, AI means even more crap on the Internet

Bo Sacks visits my inbox every weeknight with three articles about publishing. If you’re in the publishing business and you’re not signed up, you should be. Link below.

Recently I received this article from Chris Black. “Reading Print Magazines Is an Elite Pursuit”

Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a rehash of the print vs. digital thing, but the following sentence about that transition caught my eye.

“The focus in publishing shifted to cranking out many stories a day instead of a select group each month.” E.g., in a magazine.

It necessarily follows that this change led to a decrease in quality. That makes sense intuitively, but we’ve all seen it with our own eyes. There’s a lot more garbage out there chasing traffic and “reach.” Mostly because of the need to feed the ad monster.

We’re facing a new and more momentous challenge to publishing with the advent of AI. Publishers can now go full crapola and crank out even more articles every day. We can drive down the value of content even further, and stretch meager advertising revenue over an even broader landscape of silly nonsense.

Or, we can pause and ask what it is we’re trying to do. Is publishing just a widget factory for words? Are we mass producing whatever will help us chase ad revenue?

Or does publishing have a higher purpose of explaining and educating?

To some extent it doesn’t matter. AI will result in an increase in low-quality content on the internet, and no amount of moaning and complaining is going to stop that.

But doesn’t that create an opportunity?

If you’ve followed digital publishing, you know that there will be a lot of publishers who’ll simply say “giddyup” and fly down this highway even faster. They’ll chase the algorithm. If that means posting 45 second AI-generated videos on TikTok with “surprised guy face” in the thumbnail, that’s what they’ll do.

It’s just what we’ve seen for decades with a faster engine.

Will this create a market for a second type of publisher who believes that human talent is able to do better?

It can be a mistake to bet on the intelligence of the general public. When faced with a choice between intelligent analysis and some snarky guy who can make the news funny, a lot of people will choose the snarky guy.

It reminds me of the story about Adlai Stevenson. Someone allegedly yelled out, “Governor, you have the vote of every thinking person,” to which he allegedly replied, “That’s not enough, madam, we need a majority.”

That’s not an endorsement of the politics of Adlai Stevenson, by the way. It’s just a funny quote that illustrates the problem.

In the publishing world, we’ve allowed the ad-driven big tech monster to create a marketplace that prefers nonsense.

Is that just our fate? Shall we simply eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we all live in the Idiocracy? Or is it possible to change the market?

Everybody tells me there’s a “dark web.” Can there be a “not stupid web”?

Or, as Chris Black seems to imply, is the “not stupid web” found on a piece of paper?

Links

Reading Print Magazines Is an Elite Pursuit
https://www.gq.com/story/pulling-weeds-with-chris-black-reading-print-magazines-is-an-elite-pursuit

Bo Sacks
https://www.bosacks.com/