Some Medium writers and editors applaud the platform’s approach to AI. Eric Pierce, who founded Fanfare, Medium’s largest pop culture publication, says he doesn’t have to fend off many AI-generated submissions and that he believes the human curators of Medium’s booster program help highlight the best in the writing. platform human. “I can’t think of a single article I’ve read on Medium in the last few months that even hints at being created by AI,” he says. “More and more, Medium feels like a bastion of sanity in the midst of an Internet desperate to eat itself alive.”
However, other writers and editors believe that they still see a plethora of AI-generated writing on the platform. Content marketing writer Marcus Musick, who edits several publications, wrote a post lamenting what he suspects is an AI-generated article. went viral. (Reality Defender conducted an analysis of the article in question and estimated that it was 99 percent “probably manipulated.”) The story appears to have been widely read, with more than 13,500 “claps.”
In addition to spotting potential AI content as a reader, Musick also believes he encounters it frequently as an editor. He says he rejects about 80 percent of potential contributors per month because you suspect they are using AI. It does not use AI detectors, which it calls “useless,” but instead relies on its own judgment.
While the volume of likely AI-generated content on Medium is notable, the moderation challenges the platform faces—how to surface good work and keep trash out of the way—have always plagued the Web as a whole. The rise of AI has simply exacerbated the problem. While click farms have long been a problem, for example, AI has given SEO-obsessed entrepreneurs a way to quickly resurrect zombie media outlets by filling them with AI garbage. There’s an entire subgenre of YouTube hustle culture entrepreneurs creating get-rich-quick tutorials that encourage others to build AI on platforms like Facebook, Amazon Kindle, and, yes, Medium. (Sample title: “Middle Empire SEO with AI in 1 Click 🤯”).
“The medium is in the same place as the Internet as a whole right now. Because AI content is generated so quickly that it is everywhere,” says plagiarism consultant Jonathan Bailey. “Spam filters, human moderators, etc., are probably the best tools they have.”
Stubblebine’s argument (that it doesn’t necessarily matter whether a platform contains a lot of crap, as long as it successfully amplifies good writing and limits the reach of said crap) is perhaps more pragmatic than any attempt to banish crap entirely from the AI. Your moderation strategy may well be the smartest.
It also suggests a future in which Dead Internet Theory comes to fruition. The theory, once the domain of extremely online conspiracy thinkers, maintains that the vast majority of the Internet is devoid of real people and human-created posts, and is instead clogged with AI-generated trash and bots. As generative AI tools become more common, platforms that stop trying to eliminate bots will incubate an online world in which human-created work becomes increasingly difficult to find on AI-flooded platforms.