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twbrn t1_j5ok4w0 wrote

Reply to comment by DragoonXNucleon in CNET's AI Journalist Appears to Have Committed Extensive Plagiarism by iingot

> How can we expect them to pay journalists if we also force them to give their content for free? Reddit should have to pay per view when it clips content.

Thing is though, it goes both ways. A lot of tech sites these days simply skim Reddit, Twitter, and other similar sites to produce "content."

Speaking as a former technology journalist, a lot of this goes back to the erosion of online advertising values that has been accelerating for 15 years. Websites put more ads on, and more obnoxious ads so that people are forced to see them. More ads means less revenue per ad, which means sites put on more ads, which means less revenue... All this adds up to them trying to balance the equation on the side of getting more clicks, and getting content FASTER than anyone else. Not necessarily better, just faster.

Where you used to have websites that did extensive, in-depth testing of devices, now you have somebody slapping together a handful of photos and a reworded press release and calling it a "review" of a new device. It doesn't matter that it's not good; it didn't take long to produce, and they don't care about the quality of their content. Likewise the spike in clickbait even among formerly respectable publications; if a site can get you to click on an article about "The shocking new feature included in all Samsung phones" or the like, it doesn't matter that it was a nothingburger or that it took them five minutes to put together. You already clicked and gave them their ad impressions. Or skimming some user quotes off Reddit and Twitter and giving it some snappy name like "Users trash latest Google service over massive flaws."

The problem comes down to, there's no easy way to fix this. I suppose you could try to build a select crowd that's willing to pay for quality journalism ala Patreon, but Google provides a massive engine to anyone who wants to throw their stuff out there for free. It's like a small, quality restaurant trying to compete with McDonalds. They might attract a following, but McDonalds is still going to represent 99% of the volume.

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DragoonXNucleon t1_j5onjvc wrote

There is an easy fix. Its revenue sharing.

If you display the totality of content, you either pay for it or take it down.

Back in the print days, if I just plagiarized your article and printed it in my own magazine you could sue me. Why has this changed? Well, Google writes the laws now.

In video media there are fair use laws. You can only use X seconds of a video before it becomes theft. Reddit, Facebook, Google are all selling other peoples content. Imagine if web site runners could set DNS record indicating a rev share PPV price. If a piece of content receives over X views that price kicks in and the owner would be liable.

Until we make laws to protect journalism, we won't have it.

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twbrn t1_j5pawtn wrote

In principle, it sounds good. The problem is that laws are made generally by people who have no idea about how technology works. And even when they do, they don't want to. We're still struggling with laws for something as basic as network neutrality.

There's also a lot of wiggle room that would make it difficult for a one-size-fits-all law to cover and, more importantly, enforce. You'd be looking at needing some kind of agency that actually made sure the rules were followed and settled disputes.

Maybe it could be done on a good faith basis, the way that groups like the Writers Guild of America arbitrate cases among members. If you could get Google and a few other big players on board, you might have a groundswell. But there's a lot of incentive for big tech companies not to want to stop the free circulation of content when the only people they're really hurting are writers and readers, not themselves.

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M_Mich t1_j5oqyr0 wrote

it’s why i canceled my apple news subscription. all the stories outside of cnn and bbc were websites creating “news” about reddit or twitter posts that had high controversy. and a number of articles that pointed to reddit then the reddit page linked to the article

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JonOrangeElise t1_j5r00h6 wrote

Well, Google claims to be making an attempt to penalize content farm journalism by rewarding EAT (expertise, authority, trust) signals and penalizing sites that toss shit together or (presumably) resort to AI. But the google bot is capricious and inconsistent and too often legitimate news sources get the short end of the algo update too. Curious: what career did you segue too after tech journalism?

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twbrn t1_j5rmyxh wrote

I'm glad that Google is at least trying. The problem with Google though is that they entrust making choices about content to an algorithm, and eventually people find ways to beat it. Like when they started measuring the time people spent on a site as an indicator of content quality, and sites started throwing a ton of fluff at you before they got to the actual information to prolong your visit. (If you've ever wondered why some sites/articles have a recap of the entire history of Samsung before some bit of news about the newest phone, or a long rambling personal story before a recipe for biscuit dough... that's a big reason why.) If there's a way to exploit the rules, people will find it. So I guess you could say I'm on the skeptical side to any kind of automated solution; machine learning only goes so far against human cleverness.

> Curious: what career did you segue too after tech journalism?

To be perfectly honest, I started taking entry level factory jobs to make ends meet. I'm currently looking for another of those, because I don't expect any of the copywriting jobs I've applied for to come through for me, nor any of the remote customer service stuff. So that, and hoping that my next novel meets some success.

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