On our review, the bulk of the A.V. Club’s AI-generated articles appear to be copied directly from IMDb.
Man that’s sad. The AV Club was my go-to site for TV/Movie reviews for years, it’s unfortunate to see them degrade into the same kind of low-value content farm that their (former) sister site ClickHole makes fun of.
I keep going to the site out of habit but I rarely even click anything any more.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Club used to be a benchmark for pop culture writing on the net and now it’s a private equity ghost town pumping out AI generated listicles," wrote film journalist Luke Dunne.
A young woman searching for the truth about why a time-traveling psychopath is after her, is thrown into a turbulent journey through the desert, time, space and her family’s past.
There’s no introduction to ease you in, no nod to the NC-17 rating’s fascinating history or some tantalizing context about the summer’s slate of releases — none of the excellent writing, in other words, that’s distinguished the A.V.
In 2019, newly appointed CEO Jim Spanfeller promised there would be no layoffs after private equity firm Great Hill Partners took over the company.
This past June, in fact, Spanfeller gutted another 13 staffers just weeks before G/O would publish its first AI article at Gizmodo, an error-riddled listicle about Star Wars.
Yet media bosses like Spanfeller and Brown remain unfazed, either genuinely believing AI’s hype or perfidiously trying to conciliate their backers with shiny, sci-fi sounding tech that they don’t understand.
The original article contains 1,392 words, the summary contains 181 words. Saved 87%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
One key point in the article missing from this summary:
What specific AI tech, if any, is the company using? From what we can tell, whatever the “AI” is doing in the A.V. Club’s case could be achieved with a simple script cobbled together long before the advent of software like ChatGPT.
This further emphasizes the need to not just find a decent review site but to find a reviewer who shares your tastes. AI can review all it likes, I’m sticking with my favorite reviewers.
Ooof. This website is hot trash. There’s like 3 moving advertisements taking up more space than the actual content.
Ad blockers are life changing, my guy. I didn’t see a single ad on the site when I looked at it.
As opposed to having their writers just copy directly from IMDb?
I guess that’s progress.
