>“We see how Google is degrading in quality. We see how AI content mills are digesting our stories and gaming the system to get more views than our original reporting they’re ripping off,” cofounder Emanuel Maiberg told me an email.
Putting content behind a wall doesn't solve the problem, at least not fundamentally. As I'm not seeing them having completely unique stories, there will always be AI content to compete with.
Current generation AI cannot compete with investigative journalists. An AI currently cannot maintain a network of sources, follow up on leads, double check statements of different sources to see if one is lying and so on.
The primary currency of an investigative journalist is trust. Trust from the sources that the journalist will publish their story correctly. And also trust from the public that what they write is true.
Of course an AI can help you write the story. But at the end of the day you have to build the whole structure on trusting that there is a human I can trust at the foundation.
Why would sources and whistleblowers trust current generation AIs? How do they know openAI and co is not listening? Why would the audience trust the current models? They have shown that they can hallucinate things regularly.
>As I'm not seeing them having completely unique stories
Not sure if I'm reading this as you intended, but 404 broke multiple interesting stories first including the one about the Russian with no ticket or passport who ended up in LA.
Putting content behind a wall doesn't solve the problem, at least not fundamentally. As I'm not seeing them having completely unique stories, there will always be AI content to compete with.