I despise undisclosed AI slop
I have a newsletter that's a few months old now. I cover the intersection of luxury, technology, and sustainability, with a focus on what it all means for luxury consumers—it's very much not an industry-focused publication.
Before I started, I made commitments to myself and to my readers that 1) every word on the site would be human-authored and 2) I'd never miss a deadline. I made the first commitment because I hope and believe that in the age of AI, people will increasingly crave stories about people, written by people. I made the second commitment because I hope and believe that consistency is important—I can think of YouTube channels and newsletters where I may not watch or read everything they do, but they've been consistent for years and I'd miss them if I lost access to them. I believe in those commitments so much that I include them in a manifesto I link to from my home page.
I publish a 1,500- to 2,500-word feature article every Wednesday, and a 600- to 800-word review every Saturday, each at a specific time. And there are times where those deadlines are tough. I was out sick this week, and the article I was working on for Saturday had hit a dead-end, so the net was that Friday evening, I had to pull myself together and write a polished article while feeling pretty terrible. I did it because keeping my commitments was important to me.
So this weekend I find out about a brand-new newsletter covering the luxury space. Not naming-and-shaming, so I'm not going to link to it here, but at first glance, it's nicely done. Minimalist but good branding and layout. Good use of photography. Long-form writing. A commitment to multiple articles a week. Nothing about the authors, but the articles are authored by "The __________ Editors". I was impressed and honestly a little jealous—how cool would it be to work with a whole team, not just be reliant on myself?
And then I read the articles. Every one of them came back with a 100% probability of being AI-generated in the tool I use to check for that, but that was just confirmation of what I already knew. The AI writing style was obvious—blindingly so in places.
It was bad enough that they didn't disclose it, but then in one of the articles, AI wrote it from a first-person perspective, strongly implying that an editor for the publication had done the thing they were writing about. It never happened—or if it did, they couldn't be bothered to write about it themselves.
So it's someone (probably just one person) somewhere using AI to generate text, to scrape images, to assemble articles, and generally to pretend to be a team of human writers who have amazing experiences and then write about them. Sigh.
In the end, the realization about their use of AI made me feel both gratified and disappointed: gratified that no, some team didn't pop up out of nowhere and was out-writing me in my space; disappointed that they're using AI in a way that makes the world a little bit worse, pretending to be human and in their own tiny way, eroding trust in online content.