The 12-year-old publishing platform has undertaken a dizzying number of pivots over the years. It’s finally on a financial upswing, having turned a

AI Slop Is Flooding Medium

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2024-10-28 19:30:06

The 12-year-old publishing platform has undertaken a dizzying number of pivots over the years. It’s finally on a financial upswing, having turned a monthly profit for the first time this summer. Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine and other executives at the company have described the platform as “a home for human writing.” But there is evidence that robot bloggers are increasingly flocking to the platform, too.

Earlier this year, WIRED asked AI detection startup Pangram Labs to analyze Medium. It took a sampling of 274,466 recent posts over a six-week period and estimated that over 47 percent were likely AI-generated. “This is a couple orders of magnitude more than what I see on the rest of the internet,” says Pangram CEO Max Spero. (The company’s analysis of one day of global news sites this summer found 7 percent as likely AI-generated.)

The strain of slop on Medium tends toward the banal, especially compared with the dadaist flotsam clogging Facebook. Instead of Shrimp Jesus, one is more apt to see vacant dispatches about cryptocurrency. The tags with the most likely AI-generated content included “NFT”—out of 5,712 articles tagged with this phrase over the last several months, Pangram found that 4,492, or around 78 percent, came back as likely AI-generated—as well as “web3,” “ethereum,” “AI,” and, for whatever reason, “pets.”