Today in AI

It turns out that the A.V, Club, now owned by PE firm Great Hill Partners, has been generating much of its content now using highly overrated Eliza programs artificial intelligence, and as a result, these articles are just copying sh%$ off of the IMBD website.

Oops.

When the iconic entertainment site The A.V. Club started publishing AI-generated articles earlier this summer at the directive of its owner, G/O Media, the backlash was intense.

"The A.V. 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. "MST3K" writer Tammy Golden called the move "sickening."

Amid the fallout, G/O editorial director Merrill Brown sent out an internal memo instructing staff to ignore the criticism.

"Several of us are very familiar with this kind of chatter as it's part of an inevitable media industry feedback loop that comes with the advance of new technologies like the Internet in the nineties and more recently the widespread use of streaming media technology," he wrote. "The best way to deal with industry chatter of this kind is to process it, dismiss the trivial and learn from what surfaces that's thoughtful and of real value."

So let's take Brown's advice and "dismiss the trivial" by going straight to the heart of all the hubbub: the AI's output.

………

But it seems that "compiled" is doing a lot of work here. On our review, the bulk of the A.V. Club's AI-generated articles appear to be copied directly from IMDb. Not "based on," but copied verbatim.

Don't believe it? Take a look at the A.V. Club Bot's synopsis of 2003's "Young Adam," in its list of movies with NC-17 ratings.

A young drifter working on a river barge disrupts his employers' lives while hiding the fact that he knows more about a dead woman found in the river than he admits.

And then compare that to IMDb's description:

A young drifter working on a river barge disrupts his employers' lives while hiding the fact that he knows more about a dead woman found in the river than he admits.

Yep, that's right: every single word is exactly the same.

Let's really hammer it home. Here's the A.V. Club Bot's rundown of "Meg 2: The Trench," in its list of movies coming out in August:

A research team encounters multiple threats while exploring the depths of the ocean, including a malevolent mining operation.

You'd think they'd mention the titular shark, right? But nope. And here's IMDb's version:

A research team encounters multiple threats while exploring the depths of the ocean, including a malevolent mining operation.

The concern about AI is not that it will create our robot overlords, but rather that capitalist ratf%$#s like Great Hill Partners will use the technology to enshittify media in the pursuit of profits.