What Are the New AI Chatbots For? Nothing Good
OpenAI’s offering, ChatGPT, became an instant hit on social media. Back in the real world, it’s just another Silicon Valley effort to churn out mediocre, disposable content.
Illustration: Yoshi Sodeoka for Bloomberg Businessweek
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Back in 2009, a period when the outlook for most industries was grim and when Silicon Valley’s world-saving potential was still taken seriously, Wired magazine published an admiring profile of a startup called Demand Media Inc. The company, co-founded by the former chief executive officer of MySpace’s parent, had landed on what seemed like the natural evolution of online content: Instead of trying to figure out a way to pay for journalism by increasing revenue—as newspapers and magazines were doing at the time—Demand used software to radically cut costs and pump out articles at an industrial scale. It paid about $15 per story and assigned topics chosen by an algorithm, many of them how-to tutorials. The idea was to game search rankings so Demand’s cut-rate articles would land near the top of Google.