Why is UK Press Gazette Jingoistic About Plagiarists and LLM Slop Disguised as Journalism?
Press Gazette appears to be participating in the attack on honest journalism.
As someone who closely follows (over RSS) Press Gazette and have linked to it hundreds of times in recent months, I'm increasingly concerned by some editorial choices made there lately. It's both frustrating and disappointing, as it seems to be exacerbating. I sometimes wonder if the people who run Press Gazette are actually press people; maybe that silently changed (people come and go). Maybe some marketing people had entered before the examples below came out. Maybe it's mischief. Hopefully a temporary fluke.
Consider this promotional spam for "CMS packed with AI features"; it says: "It’s also packed its platform full of innovative features, including AI tools, to free up more time for journalists to research and write their articles."
What do you mean by "free up more time"? For sure getting Microsoft-connected bots to spew out some text is a disservice to readers.
Press Gazette should do better than this; it should condemn and work to eliminate these ruinous trends that tread over real journalism, spewing junk to distract from honest work of people who comprehend the topics.
The people who publish this basically normalise the practice of LLM slop infused into articles under the guise of "AI" (even if there's no intelligence there at all). There's also this other promotion of "data-led decision-making" (read: clickbait and such) and "audience development" or "analytics".
This is more LLM/AI slop and "both need rebuttal", a reader of Press Gazette told us.
Whose decision was to go along with this?
"Ellen Stewart is joining Reach from Conde Nast, where she is currently director of content strategy and growth and was previously associate director of audience development, social and analytics."
Conde Nast is just spewing out corporate propaganda [1, 2], like all the LLM boosters who do nothing but cushion a Ponzi scheme for Microsoft et al, deliriously flaunting the supposed potential/merits of things not worth entertaining while they merely suck energy out of the grid, raising everybody's electricity bills.
We hope that Press Gazette will review its own editorial decisions. They bode poorly for the press. LLMs being misused like that deserve condemnation, not cheering; there's nothing too novel about these either.
The only thing worse than LLM slingers (state-of-the-art plagiarists) is supposed 'watchdogs' who cheer for the practice and make it seem acceptable. █