Beloved Local Newspapers Fired Staffers, Then Started Running AI Slop

"We weren't happy about it at all, and we were absolutely not involved in putting it up."

Porn Parade

Death with dignity? Not in this AI age.

In the latest horrifying turn in the slow-bleed demise of journalism, Wired reports that several beloved alt-weeklies, including LA Weekly and The Village Voice, have suddenly started running a deluge of suspiciously similar listicles recommending porn models.

The listicles are almost certainly generated by AI, and to make matters worse, are being presented to readers as real editorial content.

At the New York-based Village Voice — which, with its ceasing of publication in 2017 but subsequent revival in 2021, embodies the harsh vicissitudes of publishing like no other — a new content category has appeared: "OnlyFans."

Click the tab, and you're taken to a page that lists over three hundred OnlyFans listicles for every fetish under the Sun. It's something you might expect to see after clicking a shady pop-up, but is whiplash-inducing to witness on a site that once published Pulitzer Prize-winning writers.

Adding to the shadiness, none of these articles feature any disclaimers that disclose they're anything other than normal articles — a grim example of how greedy publishers are laundering shoddy AI content through the reputations of journalistic outlets.

Zero Input

LA Weekly is owned by the same parent company as the Village Voice. Earlier this year, it suffered a round of brutal layoffs that saw most of its editorial staff fired. Today, like its East Coast cousin, it also features an OnlyFans tab with hundreds of porn articles.

The byline for most of these — on both sites — is listed as Daniela LaFave, an Austin-based SEO expert who declined to confirm to Wired whether she used AI to write the articles.

RC Baker, the Voice's only remaining editorial staffer, said the OnlyFans articles weren't his decision.

"I handle only news and cultural reporting out of New York City," Baker told Wired. "I have nothing to do with OnlyFans. That content is handled by a separate team that is based, I believe, in LA."

And LA Weekly's editor is also out of the loop as well.

"We weren't happy about it at all, and we were absolutely not involved in putting it up," editor-in-chief Darrick Rainey told Wired.

Trending Botwards

The hollowing out of publications big and small in favor of AI content mills has been going on for years now.

The articles they produce are often poorly written and riddled with factual errors, but this hasn't slowed the pivot towards relying on this automated junk, which is very good at gaming search engines, to make money off of cheap clicks. And if the fates of the Voice and LA Weekly are any indication, expect to see these schemes become bolder and more prevalent.

"We're seeing an ever-increasing part of old media be reborn as AI-generated new media," Ali Shahriyari, CTO of the AI detection firm Reality Defender, told Wired. "Unfortunately, this means way less informational and newsworthy content and more SEO-focused 'slop' that really just wastes people's time and attention. Tracking these kinds of publications isn't even part of our day to day, yet we're seeing them pop up more and more."

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