Some Medium writers and editors praise the platform’s approach to AI. Medium Eric Pearce, who founded Fanfare, the largest pop culture publication, doesn’t have to fend off lots of AI-generated posts; instead, the human curators of Medium’s Boost program highlight the best of the platform’s human writing. He said he believes it will help people achieve their goals. “I can’t think of any articles I’ve read on Medium over the past few months that imply they were created by AI,” he says. “Increasingly, Medium feels like a bastion of sanity in an internet that is trying to eat itself alive.”
But other writers and editors believe they’re still seeing a ton of AI-generated writing on the platform. Marcus Muzik, a content marketing writer who edits multiple publications, wrote a post lamenting how what appeared to be an AI-generated article went viral. (Reality Defender analyzed the article in question and estimated that 99% of it was “likely to have been manipulated.”) The article appears to have been widely read, with more than 13,500 “claps.”
Musick believes that in addition to discovering the potential of AI content as a reader, he also frequently encounters it as an editor. He says he rejects about 80% of potential posters each month because they suspect they are using AI. He doesn’t use AI detectors, which he says are “useless,” and instead relies on his own judgment.
The amount of content that appears to be generated by AI on Medium is remarkable, but the moderation challenges facing the platform: how to keep good work surfaced and junk removed The challenge is one that has always plagued the entire web. The AI boom has exacerbated this problem. For example, click farms have long been a problem, but AI has given SEO-obsessed entrepreneurs a way to quickly revive zombie media outlets by filling them with AI slop. A whole subgenre of entrepreneurs in YouTube’s hustle culture are creating get-rich-quick tutorials and encouraging others to create AI slops on platforms like Facebook, Amazon Kindle, and of course, Medium . (Example headline: “1-Click AI SEO Medium Empire 🤯”)
“The media is now in the same position as the internet as a whole because AI content is generated so quickly and is everywhere,” says plagiarism consultant Jonathan Bailey. “Spam filters, human moderators, those are probably the best tools they have.”
Stubblebine’s argument is that it doesn’t necessarily matter whether a platform contains a lot of garbage, as long as it effectively amplifies good writing and limits the reach of that garbage, perhaps even AI slop. is more practical than attempting to banish it completely. His moderation strategy may well be the most sensible approach.
It also hints at a future where the dead internet theory becomes a reality. This theory was once very much the domain of online conspiracy theorists, but large parts of the internet are devoid of real people and human-authored posts, and are instead filled with AI-generated crap and bots. It is claimed that As generative AI tools become more commonplace, platforms that give up on eliminating bots will foster an online world where human-authored work becomes increasingly difficult to find on platforms overwhelmed by AI. It will be.
