Buzzfeed announced earlier this spring that it was letting most of its staff go, and shutting down Buzzfeed News entirely. My feelings on this are decidedly mixed.
I was never a huge fan of Buzzfeed, mostly because, like skimming the latest Billboard Top 10 Single list, it forced me to acknowledge my impending decrepitude. Though it purported to be a general entertainment website, Buzzfeed required an encyclopedic knowledge of Gen Z pop culture to understand much of what or whom anyone was talking about. But I also understood that the youth is always going to be the target audience for such things, and even though in recent years the site looked like it had given itself over almost entirely to quizzes that were barely concealed advertisements for everything from pasta sauce to car insurance, it had as much right to exist as anything else on the internet.
Now, Buzzfeed News, despite its connection to a website that published things like “10 Times Sydney Sweeney Was Mother,” actually engaged in legitimate journalism. It was through them that I first heard of Gypsy Rose Blanchard, the young woman who was forced to participate in her mentally ill mother’s Munchausen-by-proxy deception until Blanchard asked a boyfriend to kill her. It was where journalist Anne Helen Petersen wrote her excellent essay on Millennial burnout. Some of the best writing about #metoo was found there. Its shuttering is as much a loss to journalism as any newspaper that’s folded over the past two decades, and, oh boy, have there been a lot.
Things took a sinister turn when Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti announced last week that, while Buzzfeed wouldn’t entirely disappear, most of its staff would be let go so that the company could largely pivot to A.I. generated content. This should cause a chill in your spine regardless of whether you’re a writer, or just enjoy reading good writing.
If you’ve spent any time on the internet recently, you’ve likely seen the ongoing debate over the growing use of A.I., particularly in “enhancing” writing, art, filmmaking, and music production. People who have never had a creative idea in their soft, wet noodle brains even once think it’s a great idea, and that the regurgitation of plagiarized material will somehow result in newer, better art and writing. These are the kind of people who refer to writers and artists as “content creators,” and the fact that increased reliance on A.I. will make said content creators suffer is a feature, not a bug.
As you probably guessed, I’m on the other side of this debate.
Though the pro-A.I. contingency insists that it’s undetectable, generally you can tell when writing is A.I. generated. It reads like, well, how a robot would write, stilted, detached, and occasionally garbled. A.I. art generators have not yet figured out how many fingers a human being has, nor how to not make teeth look nightmarish. The “miracle” of A.I. is that you can simply type in an idea for something (say, “Sophie’s Choice, but with Marilyn Monroe”), and the program will respond with something it thinks you mean1, based on already existing information that may or may not be correct.
For those who insist A.I. is the next big thing in entertainment, there’s no regard for copyright protection, or for using other people’s likenesses without their consent2. All that matters is that it’s a quick, easy, and, most importantly, cheap method of churning out content, at a fraction of the effort it actually takes to write a novel3 or paint a picture. It is literally just the artistic equivalent of reheating leftovers and calling yourself a chef.
Let me be clear: I have no financial skin in this game. I gave up a long time ago the idea that I’d be able to make any sort of real money in writing, because very few people do anymore. I do it for love of the game, as the saying goes. But the game sucks, and it’s depressing. Both the supposed “inevitability” of A.I., and reaction to the Writers’ Guild strike, illustrate that too few people actually care about the work that goes into the media they consume, only that they get as much of it as they want, at as minimal a cost as possible.
Well, that’s not entirely fair. A lot of people do actually care whether or not a human being wrote or painted something. You can feed a lot of information to a computer, but you can’t make it produce human emotion. At best, you get a simulation, an idea of an emotion, by something that doesn’t experience such things. But I do believe that bottom line-focused people like Warner Bros. head David Zaslav, or Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, have little regard for such things, particularly when it comes down to balancing the books at the end of every quarter.
Given Zaslav’s admitted favoring of reality television over scripted programming, and Netflix’s now infamous habit of canceling even popular series after just two seasons (if that), I would not be terribly surprised if A.I. produced content starts worming its way into either or both of those services within the next year or two (provided it ever learns how many fingers are on the human hand). So, yes, I guess it is inevitable, even if we’ve yet to come to a consensus on such minor details as copyright protection, and whether or not you can, in fact, put Marilyn Monroe’s likeness in something without seeking permission from her estate first4.
It’s supposed to be good, I guess. It’s progress, like when minimum wage earning supermarket cashiers were put out of a job by self-checkout machines which malfunction if they’re not able to recognize a lemon. It’s our big bright future, where we don’t have affordable healthcare yet, but we can watch a version of Star Wars that looks vaguely like it was directed by a different filmmaker. Either way they both come down to keeping the wrong people rich, and taking away from those who aren’t.
As an example, a thread made the rounds on social media last week in which someone asked an A.I. art generator to depict different movies, including Star Wars and the Lord of the Rings series in the distinct style of Wes Anderson. To the generator, “Wes Anderson” seemed to mean a lot of pastels, and people staring blank-faced into a camera.
Also last week, a “content creator” approached Elon Musk on Twitter with an A.I. generated Tesla commercial featuring Ryan Reynolds, and only after being confronted with numerous questions sheepishly admitted that he hadn’t gotten Reynolds’ consent to use his image. He did hope that Reynolds would be so impressed by the fake commercial (in which, reminiscent of Clutch Cargo, only his mouth moved) that he’d be okay with it, though.
Another Twitter Person of the Day insisted that the A.I. takeover of the book industry was “inevitable,” and bragged that 25 of the books she “published” (if you want to call it that) with the help of A.I. were all just variations on Pride and Prejudice.
I haven’t even touched upon the ethical issues surrounding the actual programming that goes into A.I. platforms, which, like every product that’s produced fast and cheaply, relies predominantly on underpaid outsourced labor overseas.