--- title: "Owner of Gaming Sites Fires Writers, Hires for “AI Editor” to Churn Out Hundreds of Articles Per Week" description: "Gamurs, which owns gaming sites like Destructoid and Dot Esports, is looking for an AI editor to output up to 250 articles per week." date: "2023-06-14" modified: "2023-06-14" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/the-byte/gaming-sites-writers-ai-editor" categories: - "Artificial Intelligence" tags: - "chatgpt" - "generative ai" - "layoffs" - "the digest" --- # Owner of Gaming Sites Fires Writers, Hires for “AI Editor” to Churn Out Hundreds of Articles Per Week ![Gamurs, which owns gaming sites like Destructoid and Dot Esports, is looking for an AI editor to output up to 250 articles per week.]() *\Image: Getty / Futurism\* ## 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]()* ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()