Kotaku Staff Furious After Owner Announces Move to AI Content - eviltoast

G/O Media, an online media company that owns Gizmodo and Kotaku has announced that it will begin a “modest test” of AI content on its sites.

  • Chozo@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    The fact that I can open up ChatGPT right now and say “Write a Kotaku article about why Tetris is racist” and get a 100% believable result out of it should be a sign that they’ve been replaceable for a while now.

      • HidingCat@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        WTF that is a whole load of baloney, it’s hilarious. Also a good reminder for us who lean left to remember to be critical when discussing such things too.

        • Nepenthe@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Say what you will, I need myself a racially diverse tetris now. We should all aspire to be L shaped block.

          It’s so hard to even make fun of that without sounding like I’m on the extreme right, but I am CACKLING

      • thingsiplay@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        @Helldiver_M That reads exactly like a typical dumb shit Kotaku article. No wonder, because it was trained from human data. I don’t know what’s more shocking, that our News outlets by human is so bad we think a robot wrote it, or if the AI is that good that we think a human wrote it. Both perspectives are frightening.

        • ArugulaZ@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Video game journalism has been crappy for a long, loooong time. You ever read pre-Ziff Davis EGM or GamePro? It’s like a lobotomy in print form.

          • Colombo@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            Yet, there always has been a good journalism, either very quality reviews describing well the game in question, or very funny articles making fun of a game that is otherwise boring or bad.

            • ArugulaZ@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              I’m not saying the magazines of the time were totally devoid of good gaming coverage. Video Games and Computer Entertainment was a solid, substantial read… the layout was nothing special, but the writing was pure quality. Kind of helped that they were writing articles for adults and not edgy fourteen year olds, or nine year olds hopped up on sugar.

              • Colombo@kbin.social
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                1 year ago

                Agree. And yet again, there was reason why gaming bloggers and YouTubers like TotalBiscuit got so much popular. Gaming Journalism crashed.

                I am not disagreeing with you, I grew up on Level and Score personally.

          • phosphorik@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            Yo I loved EGM back in the N64 era and I’m pretty sure that was Ziff Davis. Then again maybe I was lobotomized with a magazine.

            • ArugulaZ@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              Ziff-Davis EGM was pretty good. Pre Ziff-Davis EGM (the Sendai era, from 1989 to 1997) was not.

      • osarusan@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        That’s hilarious, and about on par with most of the writing on so-called journalism sites these days. Glorious!

      • victron@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Lmao it’s awesome, I haven’t read Kotaku in ages, so I don’t know if it sounds Kotaku-y enough, but holy damn I can totally imagine a human nutjob writing that shit

      • pulaskiwasright@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        This sounds exactly like something Kotaku would write:

        One of the key criticisms leveled at Tetris is the lack of diversity in its visual representation. The game predominantly features blocks of different shapes and colors, but the absence of any explicitly diverse or racially inclusive elements raises questions. In a world that is culturally diverse, the omission of representation within the game can be seen as a missed opportunity to promote inclusivity.

        • chaogomu@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          It’s the training data. Every list the bot has ever seen has had the number 1 in it. All other numbers come up less than that.

          The bot also has no memory of what it wrote before, and no clue what it will write next. It simply guesses what the next word will be based on what the last word was.

          Another failure of these bots, they’re Pre-Trained. It’s the “p” in the name. So anything they generate will be based on the training data, with no changes to the algorithm based on interacting with users. You can “convince” the bot of anything and the second you close that browser window, the bot basically resets to factory defaults.

          • FaceDeer@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            Maybe it’s trying to use markdown to create a numbered list, in many flavours of markdown that would do it.

        • m3adow@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          Probably botched Markdown formatting. Ordered Markdown lists will automatically be ordered properly, so starting each point with ‘1.’ doesn’t matter.

          • exscape@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            I also think it’s botched Markdown but from the opposite perspective. When you have many points that end up parsed as several separate 1-item lists, you can write 1. 2. 3. and it will make it 1. 1. 1. since each list only has one point.

    • yaomtc@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Believable as in imitates the writing style, sure, but what’s the point if it’s factually incorrect?

      From the article:

      The company joins a growing number of media entities experimenting with the technology […] These trials have already led to a flood of error-laden, plagiarized, and poorly written content due to badly implemented — and, some would argue, inherently unsuited AI models — that still have a strong tendency to make up facts.

      Hate on Kotaku all you want but they don’t make shit up as often as AI does

      • Helldiver_M@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        To be fair, Kotaku does sometimes make shit up. Like the Persona 5-Smash crossover lyrics being ableist thing. And they tried to double down on it for awhile if I recall right.

        And yes, ChatGPT makes shit up all the time. More often then Kotaku.

        I know in a post gamergate world, we need to be diligent for things like dog-whistles. And hating on Kotaku is arguably in dog-whistle territory. I guess in my opinion Kotaku is so bad, that we should be able to safely mock the crap out of them. I’m even more happy to mock any chuds that want to keep non cis-white-males out of games. They just weren’t relevant for this occasion.

      • Colombo@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Hate on Kotaku all you want but they don’t make shit up as often as AI does

        Oh they do. Take the whole kerfuffle around Kingdom Come.

      • FaceDeer@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        I have found that one of the more effective ways to use ChatGPT for writing is to not just tell it “write me an article about…” But to give it a list of all the facts and basic arguments you want to include in the article and then tell it to use those. Takes more work to gather those bits of information ahead of time, but not a lot more work - you could basically do a bunch of Googling and copy and paste bits and pieces of what you find to use as your starting data.

  • ArugulaZ@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Good thing I spent five years in college sharpening my writing skills, only to be obsoleted by an uppity toaster. That’ll make paying my student loans so much easier.

        • sadreality@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Whould you thank any one for anything, if earned it all yourself? They literally pulled them selves up by the bootstraps !

    • EnglishMobster@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      And the people who benefited from having their loans forgiven by the taxpayers just convinced the Supreme Court that your loans don’t count and that you should be on the hook for them!

  • Kara@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I dislike Kotaku, but I still think that cheering this decision on is a bad thing, because if this works then more and more companies with better journalism will probably be replaced.

    • hellerphant@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Came here to say exactly this. I don’t like Kotaku, and think that the AI is probably doing a better job. But this does not bode well for other publications.

  • blazera@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Everyone with enough money to make corporate decisions is always the worst person at making corporate decisions

  • Zebrazilla@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Not much was lost. Both Gizmodo and Kotaku content have already been indistinguishable from poorly generated AI content for ages now.

      • TwilightVulpine@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Ironically nothing seems to rile up some gamers more than when game journalists try to be more than a corporate PR relay. God forbid anyone talks about labor issues, social issues, or worse, actually publishes a critique of a popular triple-A game.

        • sadreality@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Who is down voting this comment?

          Labour issue in game development got ur panties all bunched up?!

          I guess some really ain’t got to work for money ehh?

                • sadreality@kbin.social
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                  1 year ago

                  I am still hoping to hear what theor issue here is tbh…

                  Otherwise it feels like basic sinping for some legal persons

              • chatterbox@kbin.social
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                1 year ago

                So weird and obsessive to not only care about who might disagree with your comment, but to then seek to notify them demanding an explanation. Like I have to justify why I disagree or dont find any particular comment useful?

                I diagreed because I am a gamer and I DO care about labor conditions in the industry. While I don’t work in it, I have many friends that do and they identify as gamers and do care. I dont like making gamers a monolith, nor do I agree with the assertion that the reason they were disliked was due to them cocering labor issues. Thats why I downvoted the comment. I dont expect you or the others to agree with me, obviously, but the idea that you’d try to get people to justify it is fucking weird.

                • PabloDiscobar@kbin.social
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                  1 year ago

                  So weird and obsessive to not only care about who might disagree with your comment, but to then seek to notify them demanding an explanation.

                  Well on this forum the votes are public. Deal with it. And if you can’t then stop downvoting.

  • nobodyspecial@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Streamlining garbage-in-garbage-out for the mainstream is apparently worth trillions.

    Why would anyone bother visiting Kotaku if they could just ask an AI to make shit up directly? Management just not thinking beyond the immediate present.

  • alternative_factor@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Ever since I saw an AI play megaman I would rather have AI review videogames because they will eventually learn how to play competently.

  • Chaotic Entropy@feddit.uk
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    1 year ago

    These companies planning to become unnecessary middlemen between you and ChatGPT seem to be kind of short sighted. If you’re not providing your own (often stupid) insight then what do you really provide beyond writing prompts and saving the result on your site.

  • mastens@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I think more and more “news” websites will do more and more if this. If a sites primary driver is not quality or accurate reporting or blogging but clicks for traffic you can expect more to follow suit.

  • robcee@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    we’ve replaced all of our writers with large language models acting as writing assistants. Let’s see if anyone notices…