"We found the company's phony authors and their work everywhere from celebrity gossip outlets like Hollywood Life and Us Weekly to venerable newspapers like the Los Angeles Times, the latter of which also told us that it had broken off its relationship with AdVon after finding its work unsatisfactory."

Even if the LA Times broke off its relationship because the work was unsatisfactory, the fact that this was attempted in the first place is unsettling. What if the work hadn't been "unsatisfactory"? What if it had been "good enough"?

It's not so much the technology itself as the intention behind it: to produce content at scale without employing human journalists, largely to generate pageviews in order to sell ads. There's no public service mission here, or even a mission to provide something that people might really want to read. It's all about arbitrage. #AI

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