Yesterday, the tech blog 404 Media reported on a horrifying development in the story of the World Wide Web’s gradual decline into AI-encrusted unusability: the apparent resurrection of the once-beloved TUAW (aka The Unofficial Apple Weblog), a site that hasn’t been active for 10+ years, into an AI-powered slop machine.
To make matters worse, the new owners of the twitching corpse of TUAW have apparently seen fit to “borrow” the identities of the site’s former regular contributors, replacing their original headshots with AI-generated portraits or stock images of completely unrelated people and replacing their original archived work with AI-powered “summaries”.
Naturally, the former TUAW writers are not all that happy about this. One of the affected individuals, Christina Warren, pointed out that the reason this has been done in the first place is likely “an SEO scam that won’t even work in 2024 because Google changed its [algorithm]”. She then concluded that those responsible were “Assholes!”, which I thoroughly concur with.
This is just the latest in a long line of absolute bullshit brought about by the infestation of “AI” into everything online. There is absolutely no excuse, no justification for what has gone here. Not only is it defacing the legacy of a publication that was once loved — and trusted — by a significant number of readers, it’s also destroying the portfolios of the writers in question, who are now saddled with AI-generated slop that has their name attached to it.
“I don’t want people to come across the contents coming out of that site and think that I actually wrote like that [very poorly],” Warren told 404. And I can’t help but agree — because we have a very real problem online in that sites shuttering often means vast swathes of work by talented writers just goes in the dustbin without warning. And while sites such as the incredible, wonderful archive.org do their best to keep a record of everything that once was, the sad reality is that a lot of stuff is just plain lost.
I know, because I’ve been on the receiving end of it multiple times.
One of the first sites I ever wrote for professionally, Kombo.com, no longer exists, and its URL now redirects to a site called “GameZone”. Surprisingly, GameZone does seem to have some of Kombo’s old articles archived, though none of them are under their original byline, instead all attributed to “kombo” (lower-case). There are 28,435 articles attributed to “kombo”, all with the wrong dates on them — they claim to date back to 2012, but there are some with the headline “E3 2010”, suggesting that they were simply republished on the “newer” site in 2012 — and no means of identifying who wrote what. As such, it’s useless for me to use as part of a portfolio.
The two “big” sites I wrote for, GamePro and USgamer, also went belly-up at various points. In both cases, again, some of my work ended up archived on other sites. In the case of GamePro, some of my stuff found its way to the American tech site PC World, but a search for my name now throws up a list of useless garbage that quotes my name but doesn’t actually link to anything I wrote without manually scrolling through several pages of junk. And, of course, there’s no link to my byline for me to easily find everything by me, despite my byline being right there on the articles in question when I can find them!
USgamer, which folded a little more recently, fares a little better in that I actually have an author page on VG247, where the articles ended up — although said author page has no picture, no bio and a link to a Twitter account that no longer exists. There’s 8 pages of material from me, which I suspect isn’t all of my work from USgamer, but it’s a decent amount, at least. I just wish it wasn’t on VG247, which is a site I am… not a fan of.
In this respect, I guess I’m actually kind of lucky that my identity hasn’t been co-opted by a content farm and all my past work fed into ChatGPT to regurgitate at considerably lower quality than I originally wrote. But I have to confess that reading stories such as this one about TUAW fills me with genuine dread. I’m not overly concerned about AI “taking my job” because it’s rapidly becoming very clear that AI writing is both easy to spot and demonstrably inferior to a human being doing the same thing.
But I am concerned about the potential for AI slop with my name attached to it dragging my reputation through the mud. As a writer, I find it grossly insulting to my profession. And simply as a human being, I find what has been done here to be absolutely, totally unconscionable.
There has to be a breaking point somewhere. Soon. Please. I am rapidly running out of what little faith in humanity I have left. And there wasn’t a lot left in the first place.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
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