Journalists Have Been Turning Into AI Slop For Years

ChatGPT is the ideal employee

Attacks on the use of AI in writing generally focus on what is seen as an ugly act of individual debasement; “any single stick figure has more character and heart than any fake [AI] slop” as one poster put it on the AI-hating platform that is bluesky. The point of art is self-expression, character, and soul; AI lacks those things and therefore isn’t real art. Artists embracing AI are missing the point of art; they’re betraying themselves.

I’m ambivalent about these ideas of authenticity in art. In part that’s because I don’t think that shaming people in this way is likely to be an effective way to challenge or block the unethical aspects of AI proliferation. Capitalism wants content, not authenticity. As a result, people who use the technology don’t feel like they’re betraying themselves. Often they think that they’ve found a cool new way to put forward a self that is valued by institutions and peers, as opposed to their non-AI self, which was largely viewed as worthless.

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This article is about how freelance writing currently is a hellscape. If you pity me, and/or value my writing, consider becoming a paid contributor! It’s $50/yr, $5/month.

Solving the impossible freelance dilemma—by lying

Or to put it another way—AI is tempting for many because creative endeavor, except by a handful of superstars, is already wildly devalued. If you are a mid-level slogger AI can seem like the only way to pursue a creative career without working 24-7 and/or starving to death. Authenticity may be the purpose of art in theory, but in practice—again, unless you happen to be a superstar—the capitalists with the money mostly want to pay for the thing they’ve seen before, delivered as slickly and with as few surprises as possible.

These depressing reflections were occasioned by an article about a freelance AI fabulist named Victoria Goldiee by Nicholas Hune-Brown, an editor at a Toronto site called The Local. Hune-Brown explains that in September he put out a call for pitches on health care privatiziation. Goldiee responded with a pitch that impressed Hune-Brown because Goldie already had quotes from a number of sources. He also saw that she “had written stories for a set of publications that collectively painted the picture of an ambitious young freelancer on the rise”—including The Cut, The Guardian, Architectural Digest, and Outrider.

Many of these bylines were real; Goldiee had been very successful in placing her ChatGPT-generated stories, complete with fake quotes from (sometimes) real people, in a number of prestigious outlets. She and ChatGPT were effortlessly (literally) outcompeting actual authentic human freelancers with lived expertise and sources. How is that possible?

The freelancer who can make a living doesn’t exist

Goldiee was successful for a few reasons—none of which have much to do with the power or capacities of ChatGTP. Goldiee’s career was powered, not by technology outcompeting human creativity, but by an industry that systematically devalues creatives and what they produce.

First, Goldiee was successful because payment for freelance writing has cratered. Vanity Fair correspondent Bryan Burrough recently wrote that in the 90s he received almost $500,000 for three articles a year—which would be over 1 million dollars a year today. Obviously, most people weren’t getting anywhere near that…but it wouldn’t be that rare for a mid-level slogger a quarter century ago to get $1-$2 a word for a piece in major magazines. Decades of inflation later, the rates have mostly declined. I am a 20-year veteran at this point, and at the very best I make 50 cents a word. Sometimes I make a tenth of that.

How do people manage to make a living at freelancing when they get paid worse than fast food employees? Well, you have to cut corners. You can’t do a ton of research on a pitch before it’s accepted, for example. You can’t travel. And you have to write a lot, and you have to write fast. I, for example, write 7-8 articles a week, every week, year in year out. For 20 years.

The fact that writers are vastly underpaid creates a huge advantage for someone using ChatGPT who is willing to lie a lot. As Hune-Brown points out, Goldiee’s big advantage was that she had already gotten quotes for her pitch—something freelancers could do once upon a time when they got paid enough on the backend to make research up front a reasonable gamble, but which is, at this point, completely impossible for most of us.

Hune-Brown also notes that Goldiee wrote pieces set in Ghana, Nigeria, Toronto, the US, and England. Again, it once could have been possible for a freelancer to report from a wide range of locations because said reporter was getting paid enough to travel—and might even have gotten a publication to pay expenses. Nowadays, though, scribblers are generally relegated to scribbling wherever it is they happen to be. I’ve been paid to travel literally once in my 20 year career (that didn’t include hotel expenses, so I ended up sleeping at the airport.)

No one wants a freelancer with ideas

ChatGPT provided Goldiee with a huge advantage in part because it made it seem like she was doing all the work that a freelancer really should, ideally do, but which freelancers are no longer paid enough to do. But it also provided her with a huge advantage because it allowed her not to do the work which freelancers should ideally do, but which publications don’t really want them to do anymore.

Hune-Brown says that at some point he realized that “the reason [Goldiee’s] pitch had been appealing to me to begin with was likely because a large language model somewhere was remixing my own prompt asking for stories where ‘health and money collide,’ flattering me by sending me back what I wanted to hear.” And this wasn’t just Hune-Brown; Goldiee had placed a bunch of stories at prestigious publications not because ChatGPT was generating new, innovative story ideas, but because it was not.

Many publications do of course want a certain number of blockbuster stories that people aren’t expecting or that break new ground; they generally assign those to big name writers. The bulk of stories, though, aren’t like that. Instead, publications often want fairly specific content that is “surprising” in expected ways. They want a personal take on a story in the news from a underrepresented perspective that doesn’t challenge mainstream expectations too much. They want information about sexy scandalous trends even if it’s not really that sexy or isn’t really a trend (see Caitlin Flanagan’s whole career). They want conclusions that fit their ideological priors (you can’t write at Reason about how the best way to help sex workers is by creating a stronger safety net. Ask me how I know.)

Publications have always had their own axes to grind and their own narratives to push. What’s different now is that editors have fewer resources and less time to spend working on stories, and to balance the publication’s needs with…well, with what’s actually happening out there in the world. In the past (ideally) an editor would have an idea, and then a freelancer—with expertise, knowledge, and maybe some initial reporting under their belt—could say, “well, this works for this reason, but this is bullshit and we need to rework that.”

Part of what a freelance writer does, in other words, is tell an editor something they don’t know—which not infrequently means telling the editor that they are kind of (or outright) wrong. A good pitch isn’t the pitch that says exactly what the editor wants to hear; it’s often the pitch that tells the editor that what they want to hear isn’t quite what they should be listening for. It’s the pitch that creates friction, rather than greasing the skids.

But, again, no one at any publication has any money now, which means no one wants friction. They want someone to parrot their prompt back to them. And ChatGPT can do that better than any freelancer precisely because ChatGPT isn’t a human with a brain. It’s just a parrot.

You can’t sell your soul if no one is buying

Hune-Brown is aware of these issues, and sums them up nicely from his perspective as an editor:

Every media era gets the fabulists it deserves. If Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair and the other late 20th century fakers were looking for the prestige and power that came with journalism in that moment, then this generation’s internet scammers are scavenging in the wreckage of a degraded media environment. They’re taking advantage of an ecosystem uniquely susceptible to fraud—where publications with prestigious names publish rickety journalism under their brands, where fact-checkers have been axed and editors are overworked, where technology has made falsifying pitches and entire articles trivially easy, and where decades of devaluing journalism as simply more “content” have blurred the lines so much it can be difficult to remember where they were to begin with.

AI did not degrade the value of writing, nor did it rob freelance writers of their authenticity or special suchness. That work had already been done. Over the last twenty years, I’ve watched as writing has been transformed. When I started, it was a reasonable professional career with a certain level of prestige and a reasonably middle-class income for people with skill and determination and a bit of luck.

And now…it’s a demeaning treadmill, where you need to be everything to all people all the time and in which having a personality or a point of view is decidedly a bug, not a feature. AI is the frictionless, brainless, superfast content-generator that media oligarchs demanded. Small wonder that some writers, told that their souls and their commitment to the truth are both worthless, have chosen instead to sell soullessness and lies.