Owner of Gaming Sites Fires Writers, Hires for "AI Editor" to Churn Out Hundreds of Articles Per Week

"The future of written gaming content is here!"

Outrageous Output

With a brutal round of layoffs in March, a media outfit called Gamurs that owns several popular gaming sites including Dot Esports and Destructoid culled the jobs of at least 50 humans — annihilating, by some estimates, around 40 percent of its workforce.

Now, just months later, the media group has been caught putting up a job listing for an "AI Editor," who with the help of an "AI Content and SEO Strategist" would use AIs like ChatGPT to output up to an astounding — if not outright impossible — 200 to 250 articles of questionable quality per week.

The more you unpack what those numbers entail, the more ludicrous it gets. According to the listing, the "AI Editor" would have to "write headlines, add links, add images, and other WordPress production processes," and would be expected to "rewrite content where appropriate."

Assuming a five-day work week, that's a lot to ask of one person to do with up to 50 articles per day, or less than ten minutes per article — as busy as busywork gets.

The pay isn't remarkable, either. At the listed salary range of $40,000 to $55,000 per year, that works out to roughly $4.23 per article, at best.

Trending Downward

First spotted by Kenneth Shepard, a staff writer at Kotaku, the embarrassing job listing has since been deleted, but not before onlookers, including other horrified gaming journalists, weighed in with righteous fury.

"The future of written gaming content is here!" tweeted a sardonic Tom Henderson, who runs Insider Gaming.

Fellow games journalist Imran Khan was more blunt. "Drag this company through the mud," he wrote.

It's not hard to understand their anger. For Gamurs to think it could replace its workers with a skeleton crew — if you could even call it that — of people using generative AI is as laughable as it is offensive. But as unscrupulous as the practice is, Gamurs is only following the trend of much of the industry at large.

Insider, for example, laid off some ten percent of its staff in April, right after announcing its pivot to AI. CNET gutted its news team after a disastrous attempt to publish AI-generated content. BuzzFeed did pretty much the same thing.

The end result? The worst possible outcome for both writers and readers — but that doesn't seem to be stopping more of the media industry from continuing to follow suit.

More on AI: OpenAI Warned Microsoft That Its AI Is Absolutely Terrible At Telling the Truth