Medium bans AI-generated content from its paid Partner Program

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/technology/medium-bans-ai-generated-content-from-its-paid-partner-program/

by thunderbong • 2 years ago

47 60 2 years ago

bleepingcomputer.com

endre• 2 years ago

it's medium that should be banned

dkersten• 2 years ago

Both, really

aldarisbm• 2 years ago

Honest question... Why?

I understand that medium is not absolutely necessary and ideally we would have an open source tool that is easy to deploy. In the meanwhile, I use medium quite a bit.

barfbagginus5• 2 years ago

When we use medium, we tell our audience we don't care if they get bombarded with bad UX, like subscription popups. And we tell our accessibility activist audience that we don't want them to read us at all.

I immediately nope out of medium articles. I black list medium on my search engines. And I criticize medium authors on HN instead of reading their articles. This is all with the hope of bringing back more accessible old school blogs.

If I wrote a blog in 2024, I would use a free GitHub Pages site, and use a markdown based blog generator. This distributes my message for free, without attacking my audience's attention with sign up screens.

felideon• 2 years ago

How is this policy enforceable? There aren’t any reliable ways to detect LLM-generated text, are there?

rany_• 2 years ago

Using common sense, probably. You don't need an LLM detector to tell that something is AI generated.

paxys• 2 years ago

You don't need an LLM detector to tell that something is visibly AI generated. With some minor prompting and editing it can be indistinguishable from any other writing.

TuringNYC• 2 years ago

> Using common sense, probably. You don't need an LLM detector to tell that something is AI generated.

This could quickly turn into a witch hunt

Verdex3• 2 years ago

It looks like you're getting downvoted, but my opinion is that your statement is correct.

Yes, technically, common sense doesn't work because some things written by AI won't be obviously written by AI and some things written by people can appear to be written by AI when it was not.

However, I suspect that medium doesn't actually care if something is written by AI or not. They want to stop the person writing hundreds of garbage articles a day. The person writing a nonstop deluge of poor quality articles sans AI is going to be erroneously banned. The person writing high quality articles 100% powered by AI won't be banned. AI will simply be the justification for culling what they do not want.

overstay8930• 2 years ago

this works until an entire generation of people are used to reading LLM generated text and they write like an AI

speedylight• 2 years ago

That strategy works for lazy publishers; with a bit editorializing and prompt refinement you can make a AI generated text indistinguishable from written text. Believe me it’s easier than it has any business being.

EA-3167• 2 years ago

Read a TOS some time, it's enforceable because they can choose to do absolutely whatever the hell they want. If they're wrong, well... tough nuts.

SkyPuncher• 2 years ago

Because the actual policy is “we can remove anything”. Just the positioning is they’ll only use it on AI.

iainctduncan• 2 years ago

They have years of data on how fast a regular account can generate content. If you are producing 100 times more content.... or content 100 times faster....

dandesim2• 2 years ago

The policy is enforceable through moderation. They're probably looking for multiple indicators then doing a manual review. The only way to monetize Medium is through the partner program, which is reliant on high volume of posts or a post to go viral. It's unlikely an AI generated post will go viral, but it is very likely people will spam the system and start posting 3-5x a day to get a few dollars. I don't think they're as concerned with someone using AI as an assistant to write a few posts a month, but rather AI slowly draining their payouts from real people.

hk__22• 2 years ago

Any story using AI help must clearly mention this within the first two paragraphs.

What’s AI here? Is the spelling correction tool in Google Docs "AI"? Are the suggestions from my iPhone "AI"? This is the kind of very vague sentence written by someone who doesn’t understand AI.

lelandfe2• 2 years ago

https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/22576852947223-Art...

We define AI-generated writing as writing where the majority of the content has been created by an AI-writing program with little or no edits, improvements, fact-checking, or changes. This does not include AI writing tools such as AI outlining, or AI assisted fact, spelling, or grammar checkers
Do I need to disclose the use of AI-assistance such as grammar or spell checkers, outline assistance, or fact verification?
No, you do not need to disclose this use. You must disclose if you are using text or images generated by AI

barfbagginus5• 2 years ago

This is not very clear about the case where the text is AI generated and substantially edited, fact checked, and improved by a human co-author.

I think that kind of writing is perfectly valid. AI contexts can now include primary references, and with human critique, AI can fix a lot of its own style and factuality issues.

A good author writing this way will end up writing in their own voice, but spend less time drafting and revising, since they can delegate that to their AI assistant.

hk__22• 2 years ago

Thanks; it’s not very clear that "AI help" excludes "AI-assistance".

skywhopper• 2 years ago

They mean "entire posts generated by LLMs". They aren't going after AI-assistance. They are telling you not to set up your content spam farm on Medium.

michaelbuckbee• 2 years ago

All publishers are grappling with this where they want generally higher quality content (defined as more engaging, intrinsic quality is something else) and less low effort spam or retreaded concepts.

AI-generated content has really dropped the floor on how cheap it is to produce niche blogspam, and they're saying: "Hey if you're pushing out 1000s of articles a day on a topic and we look at it and it's insane gibberish, we're just going to assume it's no good on principle and ban you."

Nobody is getting banned for the "Gray-AI" of assisted writing, where you get help with an outline or use Grammarly Pro to rewrite your sentences into coherence.

Verdex3• 2 years ago

I believe this to be the correct take away.

They don't actually want to ban AI content. They want to ban garbage content. If they claim that something is AI content, then it's not like there's a good defense a writer can offer. Short of meticulously recording themselves typing the article up on a typewriter in real life ahead of time. In real time so everyone can see them going through revisions.

This is AI and we're banning you, is simply a sufficiently socially acceptable reason to get rid of content that they otherwise don't want clogging up their site.

red_admiral• 2 years ago

Indeed. xkcd 810 comes to mind.

sebastiennight5• 2 years ago

Well someone could easily whip up a prompt-to-video which, given a prompt, outputs an entire article AND a screenrecording of laboriously typing-and-revising from a draft to the final output.

It would probably take a weekend.

the_snooze2• 2 years ago

AI-generated content has really dropped the floor on how cheap it is to produce niche blogspam

For all the potential good utility AI has, my current outlook is that it's primarily going to be used as a noise-generator at scale. As long as there's money (or influence) to be had from clicks and advertisement, the near-zero cost of AI-generated content means people will take advantage of that arbitrage opportunity.

bee_rider• 2 years ago

On the bright side we’ve desperately needed a noise filter for, like, a decade or so. At least these LLMs are a big noticeable discontinuity to make the problem obvious.

taneq• 2 years ago

The real issue isn't 'insane gibberish', because that's quickly and cheaply discernible. The real issue is eloquent, well written text that looks like a new contribution but is actually a re-hashed mixture of the same six talking points as the other 1000 articles published by the same entity, because you have to actually read and think about it to realise that it's wasted your time.

We're not fighting against random noise, we're fighting against manufactured pap.

neverokay2• 2 years ago

Even so, if the paradigm shift occurs most of us will be summarizing the manufactured pap via an LLM. Our time won’t be wasted in that case.

No clue how this all ends, but I can’t see any reason for websites to exist anymore. We’ll be going from one black prompt screen LLM with a Reddit logo on the top left, to another tab with the same LLM with a Medium logo on the top left.

Seems pointless, just combine it and list the sources.

MSFT_Edging5• 2 years ago

use Grammarly Pro to rewrite your sentences into coherence

Is it just me or is this a bizarre practice for someone who is actively making money on writing?

Like, shouldn't you be expected to at least have competence in your craft? Writing with correct grammar should be the baseline of someone writing for profit. Or even "help with an outline", if you can't write an outline of what you're trying to communicate, and you need the averaging machine to help you, do you actually have a unique understanding of the topic? Or are you merely rehashing existing content that's been fed into the averaging machine?

aftbit2• 2 years ago

I think it's just you. That's like saying you should know how to spell perfectly if you're a professional writer, and should not use spell check. LLMs are just spell check on steroids.

stavros• 2 years ago

Exactly, tools like this help bring your writing up to "average", if you're making a living writing, you should already be much better than that. It's kind of like a painter using a "paint by numbers" canvas.

mkmk3• 2 years ago

I don't really care about grammar so long as the point is communicated. Some people are trying to write in a non-native language, or just need a bit of help. Whatever tooling that helps improve communication is great, I think the content is more important than the language used to communicate it.

Also your point could be made equally well about people using spellcheck.

creesch• 2 years ago

It is bizarre if you don't take it quite literally. In practice, it is possible, even for seasoned writers, to sometimes create sentences that could use a bit of attention. If Grammarly is the right tool for that can be debated, but that is the case for any tool.

I feel like your response is along the lines of "programmers shouldn't use syntax highlighting" and similar arguments against tooling.

Then there are also the folks out there who want to publish their writings in English, but for who English is not their native language. They might use sentence structures that don't work quite as well in English as they do in their native language.

makeitdouble• 2 years ago

Applying your argument to coding, it would be about writing near perfect code without autocomplete, boilerplate templates, and be able to cleanly match types without static analysis or the compiler yelling after us.

That's a nice ideal to strive for, but that wouldn't make us all better programmers or not worth actively getting paid for programming.

AlwaysRock• 2 years ago

I guess it depends on what you call making your money on writing. At one point, most of my money was from writing emails. I can't really spell and somehow my grammar is worse. LanguageTool, and whatever plug in/extension/google search copy and paste that I've previously used, allows me to communicate the same message but without spelling/grammar mistake many people would see.

There is almost no chance I'm going to spend a significant amount of time relearning grammar and how to spell. But that has almost nothing to do with my ability to communicate or make money writing. The grammar tools just translate my sentences into the format we've all agreed is correct. Almost like a linter but for English.

dragonwriter• 2 years ago

Is it just me or is this a bizarre practice for someone who is actively making money on writing?

No, its not bizarre for paid writers to use tools that are a lower-overhead replacement for paid copy-editors when using a platform that's entire value is that it serves as a lower-overhead replacement for a publishing house but which also doesn't provide most of the things a publishing house would provide except distribution and payment processing.

It's really the most natural thing in the world. If AI was up to snuff for it, it wouldn't be surprisibg for Medium authors to use automated tools to function as editors (not merely copy editors) as well.

sebastiennight5• 2 years ago

I've written a number of books, 3 of them bestsellers, and I've always looked for outside input to help with the outline.

When you're close to a deadline, or too close to the subject, you need some outside guidance to make sure you're not missing some obvious step in getting your point across.

It's not always easy to find someone that knows how to be a great sounding board. They need to be very smart system thinkers, naive about the topic, engaged and interested. I have such friends, but I try to use their time sparingly.

So now I do use AI to either provide a first-draft of an outline for new content, or (my preferred MO) to review my own first draft suggest missing items I should cover.

radarsat1• 2 years ago

Nobody is getting banned for the "Gray-AI" of assisted writing, where you get help with an outline

Maybe not but it's certainly worth worrying that this is what will happen just because the line has to be drawn somewhere and that's an easier way to draw it. Baby, bathwater, etc.

neverokay2• 2 years ago

Hmm, I didn’t consider this. Anyone actually generating AI articles on these types of platforms and profiting?

Thanks for letting me know Medium lol.

dandesim2• 2 years ago

Just like many of these schemes, the first person to do it will probably make a good amount of money, but every nth person after that will make much less. There has always been a large group of people trying to spam their way through the Medium partner program.

htrp• 2 years ago

How can they tell? as far as I know the state of the art can't reliably distinguish ai generated content.

wvalurejr• 2 years ago

Is this story not AI-generated? Every sentence feels like it's just repeating the same thing and some of them are... like what is this: 'With the banning of AI-generated content from the Paid Partner program, Medium has further cracked down on distributing this type of content.'

With the posting of this post, I am making people more aware that there are posts on HN, further cracking down on not posting.

Medium bans AI-generated content from its paid Partner Program

Related Stories