According to their website, Publications owned by GAMURS Group include:

Destructoid

The Escapist

Siliconera

Twinfinite

Dot Esports

Upcomer

Gamepur

Prima Games

PC Invasion

Attack of the Fanboy

Touch, Tap, Play

Pro Game Guides

Gamer Journalist

Operation Sports

GameSkinny

    • A lot of sites like these are already just click farms with “articles” consisting of a headline and a couple poorly-researched sentences. Switching to AI probably won’t significantly change the quality of what they’re churning out.

    • Something to keep in mind is that these companies aren’t concerned with total profit or revenue or anything like that - it’s all about the percentage. I suspect in the short term, these AI-articles will look very profitable. Networking effects, consumer habits, and SEO will carry the day for a time.

      But what always screws these MBA types is the inability to recognize the specific natures of their business and the second order effects. Not all costs are representable on a spread-sheet.

      Basically, the second order to me really boils down to this: AI generated content isn’t really a ‘brand’. Good writing shops tend to build a following with their writers and expectations with their editors. The writing, investigative, and editorial bent of a house is essentially what makes a shop. See The Economist and The New Yorker as examples. In other places, a lot of niche shops are selling personality as much as product with youtube, podcasts, and others.

      this means there is no real ‘value add’ someone like an AI shop can provide. You are throwing yourselves down the hole of becoming a pure commodity, and as every business major knows, being a commodity sucks. Short term profitable, but literally no one cares about where a mass produced nail comes from and its a race to the bottom of price.

      So, as time goes on, with the barrier for entry being incredibly low, every bill and joe who fancies themselves an SEO wizard has no reason to not jump in, so your competition rises and your ability to charge some value for (ads?) drops a lot. But that’s the tip of the iceberg. Many of the companies that would occupy this brandless, commodity-filling space are way better positioned to make a run at it than the GAMURS Groups of the world. Microsoft’s Bing chat and (probably soon to follow Bard) will whip your ass in the long-game. Why search Bing to get an AI article from the Escapist when Bing will do it for me? I really doubt anything churned out by an AI with some edits will be that much better per convenience.

      This whole could easily collapse in on itself. Like a lot of people in the AI space, I’m interested to watch what happens when AI begins to consume and be built on its own content.

      • Basically, the second order to me really boils down to this: AI generated content isn’t really a ‘brand’. Good writing shops tend to build a following with their writers and expectations with their editors. The writing, investigative, and editorial bent of a house is essentially what makes a shop. See The Economist and The New Yorker as examples. In other places, a lot of niche shops are selling personality as much as product with youtube, podcasts, and others.

        Yep. This is why I’ve been a paying subscriber to Ars Technica for over a decade. You’re exactly correct. Ditto with NPR.

  • The enshitification of the internet continues. How can we offer our content, but without having to pay anyone for it and at a much higher rate of delivery? By not giving a fuck about the quality anymore and not having any real competition so people have no choice. Except people always have a choice. We can walk away.

  •  JZshark   ( @JZshark@beehaw.org ) 
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    451 year ago

    Considering how many blogs are just AI generated garbage now, it doesn’t surprise me that the big players are looking to automate their articles.

    The issue is that AI can’t really create… it just remakes what it already knows and has seen before. No hot takes. No new ideas. Just whatever has been done before.

    Hopefully this isn’t the new way everything goes…

  • I’m just waiting until these models get completely unraveled by training on output. The more people use generative AI to make stuff online, the more useless the internet is as a data source.

  •  Plume (She/Her)   ( @Plume@beehaw.org ) 
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    1 year ago

    Destructoid; The Escapist; Siliconera; Twinfinite; Dot Esports; Upcomer; Gamepur; Prima Games; PC Invasion; Attack of the Fanboy; Touch, Tap, Play; Pro Game Guides; Gamer Journalist; Operation Sports and GameSkinny.

    Noted. I’m officially starting a “not reading your crap” list.

    •  bartera   ( @bartera@beehaw.org ) 
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      191 year ago

      What would you legislate here? The publication clearly doesn’t care about quality and paying some people to fill shitty, already pre programmed templates and using something like chatGPT seems like the same style of crap.

      They were definitely not a safe source of labor.

      Also, I’d caution against reactive takes of “legislation” when the politicians who can legislate usually don’t understand the technologies and are simply trying to bundle stuff in for their lobbyist (who funds them) benefit. The same types who “want to ban encryption” or other myopic takes.

      Stronger rights and guarantees around imbalances of power (not specifically related to tech either) would work much better than just reacting to an AI scare.

    • Will it eventually be AIs at the marketing firm telling the execs that their ads are successful because the AIs on the other side are ‘reading’ it for new training data on how to better optimize viewer attention span? Just two Ad companies paying each other back and forth?

      • I’m least worried about The Escapist, as the editor-in-chief for the past few years Nick Caldera is running it with integrity. It is the only game news site I am happy to pay a subscription to.

        • How does that matter if the owners just fired all the writers and replaced them with an AI? I see little to no integrity at a publication owned by some big group calling shots like this. These are Nick’s bosses, so uhhh… he either listens or quits.

          • Yeah if they run it that brutally, it’s going to go bad.

            But usually there is a lot of difference between how sub-companies are treated both based on how they are currently doing and how strong-headed their management is.

  • Any service looking to replace human writers with ai is positioning itself for failure once generative ai becomes more mainstream. Once your average Joe can ask a native phone app for anything they want, the Only value of written text will be the human element.

  • … until someone will use an AI to generate a whole publication… or a whole set of them… or an entire publisher… or an entire holding owning the publisher…

    I’ve just seen Black Mirror S06E01 yesterday night and it did hit deep

  • This may be a little tangential, but does anyone know of any game news sites with RSS feeds that have talented writers working for them? Some of the sites I’ve followed for years have been regurgitating Twitter opinions more and more, and it makes finding thoughtful (or just plain informative) articles far more difficult.

  •  Grimace   ( @Grimace@beehaw.org ) 
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    141 year ago

    I just don’t see ChatGPT being capable enough quite yet. These articles are going to be low quality, written in the same voice, and filled with factual errors. Not to mention released at a volume that nobody will bother to keep up with. Seems like self destruction on their part.

    • An AI writer is always going to be trash. AI can’t experience anything, only remix preexisting content. So it’ll always be a regurgitation of what others have posted. But if we keep cutting out humans, then it’ll eventually be nothing content on repeat.

      • There is also always a chance that it’s simply going to be wrong, ML cannot differentiate what is the truth or not. We see it happen with easy mistakes that people wouldn’t make and it’s going to be even worse when they get used for something more nuanced or complex.

      • Of course it’ll be trash. Quality isn’t the goal, just bulk with the aim of getting maybe fewer views per article but pumping out so so many that it’s more views, or rather ad impressions, overall with much lower cost.

        Problem is it’s shortsighted. Once those sources quickly get a reputation for trash quality folk will learn not to bother clicking through to those sources.

    •  Jarmer   ( @Jarmer@vlemmy.net ) 
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      41 year ago

      Really sad to see them fall so far. I remember back when they seemed like a beacon of light and hope of good communities and journalists etc. now to see them turn into just a spam garbage site is so sad.