"The Future of written gaming content is [AI]"

[DeScruff]

Summary

'GAMURS Group' is a company that has bought out several videogame media publications/sites (Prima Games, Twinfinite, Destructoid, the Escapist, Siliconera) in the past 3-4 years.
They are doing major layoffs. - ~40% of their workforce layoffs. (Potentially more)

They got caught putting up a job listing for an AI Editor

 

Quotes
https://futurism.com/the-byte/gaming-sites-writers-ai-editor

Quote

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.

https://knowtechie.com/gamurs-group-ai-editor/
 

Quote

Why have a staff of writers and editors when you can get away with paying a single person to use ChatGPT to handle the work of twenty?

Once they saw how negative the reception was, they deleted the entire post. As of right now, the position is “closed” on the original link to the listing.

 

Quote

When working at Prima Games during their acquisition by the GAMURS Group, Shaver dealt with situations of misgendering, misogyny, and general rudeness. So, GAMURS has precedence for mistreating workers.

Pay rates are not generally high either. Shaver explained that the freelance rates that GAMURS “have set across all its sites are are as low as $10 per whole article.”

“100% this role will lead to more layoffs,” Shaver went further. “GAMURS does not value people, it values profit.”

 

My thoughts

Disclosure: - I frequent Destructoid. The reason I found out about this is because one of Dtoid's most prominent and well liked writers, was fired today without warning with no chance for a goodbye article (which has been typical for the site) with the only explanation being that he always gave 110% when it came to the site, rather then minimum effort work.

After seeing that kids were handing in book reports for school made in ChatGPT, it was only a matter of time before some executive somewhere saw this a way to cut their labor costs. The WGA (Writers Guild of America) is proactively on strike right now to ban the use of AI for writing source material in TV shows and Movies, as they see AI being a threat in the near future.
It doesn't surprise me gaming journalism would be the first to take a bite. I just hate to see once prominent sites get turned into AI generated SEO garbage.

 

Sources

https://futurism.com/the-byte/gaming-sites-writers-ai-editor

https://knowtechie.com/gamurs-group-ai-editor/
 

[Quackers101]

it just means that gaming journalists fades, or at least some of them. sad to see with the people that one might like.

but it would also be fun to see testing AI agents to simulate players and their experience in a game, with various player "faults" or "skills", giving more of an report of the game. although not as personal? or giving insight to other assets that might just be fun than some chatGPT like statistic about how the different agents "felt" when playing?

[LAwLz]

Most gaming journalists are pretty terrible and mostly copy/paste what someone else has written (or regurgitate it) so I don't think the qualify of writing will be affected that much. 

 

I mean, the guy whose tweet you quoted said he wrote about 4 articles a day for 7 years. I kind of doubt there where that much to write about every single day, not even counting all the stuff his coworkers wrote about.

 

Most news outlets are content farms that pushes quantity over quality, and most writers are free lance that gets paid per article (thus incentivising pushing articles out as quickly as possible). Long gone are the days of researching a topic, thinking it through, gathering other people's thoughts and having editors looking things over, exchanging feedback. These sites are mostly blogs these days. 

 

Edit: with that being said, it is of course sad that people are losing their jobs. In the short term this will cause some issues for those workers. I question the work they did to begin with though, and how much the readers of those sites will notice the change. 

[Avocado Diaboli]

If someone's writing is the kind of stuff that can currently be churned out by an AI, meaning they take a press release and rewrite it or put some ancillary information around it, I'm not surprised they're getting axed. "X game gets announced, Y game gets delayed, Z game is cancelled". What little I still read of gaming publications is often just the same article across multiple sites rephrasing the same core things, wrapped in a layer of clickbait. And that's not serious journalism, that's just acting as a glorified marketing arm of the games industry that the media should be a watchdog of.

 

Sure, it sucks to be the person getting sacked and I'm sure they won't be the last. But I do have to ask, what worthwhile content has someone produced when they wrote the claimed 10k articles? I'm not a Destructoid reader, so I'm not gonna make judgments about the quality of the content, but as an observer that seems like a ridiculous number of articles to be any more than brief fluff pieces instead of real journalism that engages critically with its subject matter.

[wanderingfool2]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

Most gaming journalists are pretty terrible and mostly copy/paste what someone else has written (or regurgitate it) so I don't think the qualify of writing will be affected that much. 

Or you get things like Dean Takahashi...who struggled with CupHead's tutorial level.

[Taf the Ghost]

The topics are already mostly chosen by AI. The content farms have been this way for several years, actually. It's early AI, but they were using versions against the SEO terms to fill out article topics. It was only a matter of time before they completely flipped to it.

 

There's some deep, fundamental economic issues with Game Journalism in the modern Video Era. It's not profitable to do reviews on a large scale. While the sites can generate a lot of traffic, most of that isn't worth much. Especially not enough to cover the costs of a reviewer having to spend 20+ hours on a game and the assorted time/money to capture all of the video, edit together a video and make sure the script is coherent. This is why the sites keep getting sold to different groups. They see the traffic, but that doesn't generate nearly enough revenue to keep operating as they are.

 

It's been a bubble since about 2009, but, because Gaming is the single largest Media/Entertainment segment, some new investor group would keep trying. Ultra low interest rates had a lot to do with dumb decision making that led to that.

 

The other major issue: almost none of the staff want to be there. Since it's the place where all of the money was, it attracted all of the "journalist" that couldn't get into political reporting, which is where they wanted to be. It's a low prestige section of an industry mostly about prestige.  If you ever wondered why the whole "do they hate their audience?" questions keep coming up, that's why. They mostly hate being in the space, which is why the people making money are all of the independent creators. The Video Era also means you can't fake enthusiasm. Your real opinion always filters out, unless it's a really short video.

 

At the rate things are going, Linus might end up buying IGN for a toonie in a couple of years, then use it to rope together a YT network of video reviewers. That's actually a viable business model.

 

Lastly, because of the high SEO optimization approaches, there's this little issue that much of the traffic is just bots. Like a lot of websites are mostly bots reading each other's content. That's not exactly valuable to anyone that wants to advertise. Unless they give ChatGPT access to the credit cards.

 

Quick Edit: Anyone remember Maker Studios? Disney paid 500 million USD and it was basically a massive money pit.  Video content, much like web content, doesn't generate large corporate revenues without a very structured advertising system involved that can keep production budgets within range for profitability.  This was an obvious in 2010 as it is in 2023, but it took billions wasted in acquisitions for anyone to understand this.

[05032-Mendicant-Bias]

Well, the march of progress stops for no one...

 

As for writers, I believe that a core group of highly creatives and motivated minds, augmented by a LLM can reasonably make a bigger more cohesive works than a much larger ensembles of creatives. As they say: "too many cooks spoils the soup". LLM can augment the "dumb" parts of writing, like making coherent descriptions, recapping plots, finding plot holes, etc... In this scenarios, the increase in productivity can allow more writers to become chefs. Most works are abbandoned before they are finished, such is the effort required in writing big works.

E.g. In Amazon's Ring Of Power I can see who wrote what scene. E.g. the vulcan elf archer was clearly made by a checklist guy: "show that he is smart by making him ruin a chess game in the first scene: CHECK" Who wrote the dwarven scenes knew his craft, that was the best written part IMO. The one that build Numenor was fixated in making shades of gray characters, incompetently.

As for journalists, well, not to speak bad of the craft, but I'm under the impression that most articles are a slight reinterpretation/translation of very few primary sources. It's the very definition of a task that can feasibly be efficiently automated by an LLM. I'd like more journalist to be like Coffezilla, Matt Lavine, etc... who put effort in being the primary source. But it's lots of work.  

4 hours ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

If someone's writing is the kind of stuff that can currently be churned out by an AI, meaning they take a press release and rewrite it or put some ancillary information around it, I'm not surprised they're getting axed.

Yup. It fits one of the D: Dull. A perfect target for automation in my book.

  

5 hours ago, DeScruff said:

After seeing that kids were handing in book reports for school made in ChatGPT, it was only a matter of time before some executive somewhere saw this a way to cut their labor costs.

I really, really wish I had an LLM back in my formative years...   So much dull stuffs and research could have been supercharged by LLM. I remember getting stuck in stupid stuff just because I didn't know what to search on google or who to ask, a perfect task for an LLM.

[Stahlmann]

Not surprising that some NPC's are getting replaced by an AI. For real though, most articles are barely worth reading. They all copy each other and barely even make an effort to cover that up. But at the same times they don't really credit each other for the stuff they copy. These are not journalists that get replaced. These are more the kinds of people that write about how Malenia is a sexist character because she has a horrifying backstory.

[suicidalfranco]

Good, never considered them journalist, they never were and never will be.

They're just clickbait artists at best, rage baiters at worst.

 

[Sauron]

6 hours ago, DeScruff said:

"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.

In reality they want an excuse to pay writers less by claiming the AI is doing the work. This will likely fall on its face, after all why would you bother reading stuff that is inevitably going to be trash? The quality of e-publication articles is already pretty low due to writers being expected to put out an unreasonable amount of pieces and sometimes being paid on a per-article basis. This would just pump massive amounts of spam nobody wants to read in an already exhausted space.

[MageTank]

Finally, some intelligence in gaming journalism!

[Doobeedoo]

Meh. Just play the game yourself or before release check a bit those that know what's up for like mp games.

[Brooksie359]

I find alot of this stuff weird as it seems like we are in a futile struggle against innovations in AI. I can't really think of a time where people refusing to adapt to new technologies has ended well for them compared to those that adapt to the change. Yeah you can strike all you want but unfortunately if your competing with someone who is using AI as a tool they are going to be more productive than you and will be able to do more than you. I mean how are you going to compete with the guy who can do multiple times the work as you can for the same price as you unless you can somehow get everyone on board with not using AI. I hardly believe that would be possible because if people can get an advantage over the competition I doubt nobody would take advantage of it. I know if I was in the field I would do so. Why work harder when you can work smarter. 

[oali24]

20 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Or you get things like Dean Takahashi...who struggled with CupHead's tutorial level.

Why should he need to be good at literally one game for him to be good at his job, I don't know what he has written but I assume his job title was not "cup-head analysis specialist".

[oali24]

22 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Most gaming journalists are pretty terrible and mostly copy/paste what someone else has written (or regurgitate it) so I don't think the qualify of writing will be affected that much. 

 

I mean, the guy whose tweet you quoted said he wrote about 4 articles a day for 7 years. I kind of doubt there where that much to write about every single day, not even counting all the stuff his coworkers wrote about.

 

Most news outlets are content farms that pushes quantity over quality, and most writers are free lance that gets paid per article (thus incentivising pushing articles out as quickly as possible). Long gone are the days of researching a topic, thinking it through, gathering other people's thoughts and having editors looking things over, exchanging feedback. These sites are mostly blogs these days. 

Have you maybe considered that the quality of articles is bad because they are not paid enough to write good, thoughtful articles? If you are paid by the number of articles and work say 8 hours a day wouldn't you write more low quality articles to get paid more if the rate per article is low to begin with, maybe if the rate was higher they would not feel as pressured to push articles out quickly.

22 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Long gone are the days of researching a topic, thinking it through, gathering other people's thoughts and having editors looking things over, exchanging feedback. These sites are mostly blogs these days. 

Really? can you show me one old article that feels like it was written better back then so I can compare it to today, I wasn't around during that time so I actually want to see what the difference was.

[williamcll]

On 6/27/2023 at 1:17 PM, DeScruff said:

It doesn't surprise me gaming journalism would be the first to take a bite. I just hate to see once prominent sites get turned into AI generated SEO garbage.

Gaming journalism has been garbage for years from Bias and bigotry. A computer generated review might even be more rational and fair on games.

[LAwLz]

2 hours ago, oali24 said:

Why should he need to be good at literally one game for him to be good at his job, I don't know what he has written but I assume his job title was not "cup-head analysis specialist".

There are plenty of examples of Dean being bad at games, not just Cupheads. Doom Eternals was another game where he was really bad (seems like he struggles with looking around/aiming while moving).

When your job is to judge things for others, it might be a good idea to be somewhat competent at the subject. 

 

It's like if I were hired to review a sports car, and then I struggled to figure out how to change gear so I just drive it in first all the time. That review is useless to someone who would be interested in the car. They would be able to figure out how to change gear and would have a different experience than I did.

 

 

 

2 hours ago, oali24 said:

Have you maybe considered that the quality of articles is bad because they are not paid enough to write good, thoughtful articles? If you are paid by the number of articles and work say 8 hours a day wouldn't you write more low quality articles to get paid more if the rate per article is low to begin with, maybe if the rate was higher they would not feel as pressured to push articles out quickly.

Yes, I have considered that. I also think that the writers would still push out mostly trash even if they were paid higher because they would try and maximize their own profits.

What is needed is a restructuring of the salaries to begin with. No more pay-per-article/view. No more freelancers and instead have actual employees that get paid by the hour. But that business model doesn't work. We had that business model and it died out because it was too costly to run. Gaming journalism is not a prestigious job that makes a lot of money. It seems like it's a job for people who tried to get a different job (for example news journalists) but failed. That probably isn't true for all gaming journalists, but it seems to be true for at least a fairly significant portion.

I don't remember where I heard it, but I heard someone once say: "It's a shame that 99% of journalists ruin the reputation of the entire industry". I think there is some truth to that, at least for gaming journalism.

 

Please note that I am talking about gaming journalists who write for large websites like the ones mentioned in this thread. Independent gaming journalists are a different thing.

 

I have noticed a trend where people on this forum seem to think that raising salaries fixes all issues. My guess is that gaming journalism would still mostly be filled with clickbait, journalists copy/pasting or regurgitating what others are saying and quite frankly stupid opinions even if the salaries were higher. Not just because it's not an industry that can't afford to pay more, but also because it's not a very prestigious job so people don't want to work at those places. If you become a popular gaming journalist, why work for let's say IGN or Polygon if you can do it yourself? It's the same issue we see with tech journalism. All the good writers are leaving "big" publications like Anandtech to start their own things (Ian), or do other things (Anand, Brian, Joshua and Brandon leaving to work at Apple, Andrei leaving to work for Qualcomm). The only ones left are the site owners.

 

 

2 hours ago, oali24 said:

Really? can you show me one old article that feels like it was written better back then so I can compare it to today, I wasn't around during that time so I actually want to see what the difference was.

I was more talking about news in general. If we are talking about gaming journalism in particular then I think we don't need to look much further than old PC gamer issues like those you can find on retromags. The articles are generally much more well written and less clickbaity (except maybe the first page). Probably because they were published far less frequently. It was also a very different time, so gaming journalists were more important. Nowadays you can get 95% of the same information as the big media publishers push out by just following the game studios on Twitter. Back in the old days, if you wanted to know about something you basically had to go to the journalists to learn about it. Game studios had little to no way of reaching out to consumers directly.

That's not to say the old times were better, but they were different, and as a result, gaming journalists played a different role.

[05032-Mendicant-Bias]

4 hours ago, oali24 said:

Have you maybe considered that the quality of articles is bad because they are not paid enough to write good, thoughtful articles?

I agree, it's hard to monetize good journalism, especially because so many will copy the same primary source very cheaply, diluting potential AD/sponsorship income across countless news organizations. It's a self reinforcing cycle that prices out journalists from doing proper investigative journalism.

It's a systemic problem of our civilization that would need a radical change in how news is compensated, i don't have good solutions. News being a central component to a working democracy, I think is a strong argument that taxpayer money should compensate journalist that follow primary sources, though I have no idea who should be in charge of the payout so that the system is vaugely efficient in promoting good primary sources, and not just a money farm to pay connected bad journalists.

  

55 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

When your job is to judge things for others, it might be a good idea to be somewhat competent at the subject.

 

100% agreed. I believe you should have a basic level of competency in your job, any job. I declare that a gaming journalists need competency in journalism (interviews, writing, investigation) and gaming (being able to play games, knowing games mechanics, and knowing what gamers look for in a game.)

[oali24]

2 hours ago, LAwLz said:

There are plenty of examples of Dean being bad at games, not just Cupheads. Doom Eternals was another game where he was really bad (seems like he struggles with looking around/aiming while moving).

When your job is to judge things for others, it might be a good idea to be somewhat competent at the subject. 

 

It's like if I were hired to review a sports car, and then I struggled to figure out how to change gear so I just drive it in first all the time. That review is useless to someone who would be interested in the car. They would be able to figure out how to change gear and would have a different experience than I did.

Except he was definitely competent enough. I actually found the review and it says he completed the game in the end, and even if he had say, completed the entire thing on easy mode I would say that completing the full game on any difficulty mode the developer allows to be used without hacking/cheats is more than enough to count as competent.

https://venturebeat.com/business/doom-eternal-impressions-one-of-the-best-shooters-eva/

[LAwLz]

1 minute ago, oali24 said:

I actually found the review and it says he completed the game in the end, and even if he had say completed the entire thing on easy mode I would say that completing the full game on any difficulty mode the developer allows to be used without hacking/cheats is more than enough to count as competent.

https://venturebeat.com/business/doom-eternal-impressions-one-of-the-best-shooters-eva/

I could probably drive a full lap on a track using only first gear as well. That does not mean I am a competent driver that is in a position to tell others what the car is like and if they should buy it.

 

But I feel like we have gotten caught up on some minor detail that isn't really relevant to the overall discussion.

[oali24]

20 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

I could probably drive a full lap on a track using only first gear as well. That does not mean I am a competent driver that is in a position to tell others what the car is like and if they should buy it.

But that's driving a manual car not playing a video game, if I complete a game on easy mode I have still completed it, maybe I missed out on some aspect of the game but I still experienced a very large part of it, when I ask someone if x game was good I do not expect of them to have done every single thing that can possibly be done in the game and I doubt you do either, an analysis gained from completing a game on easy mode is just as valid as one from completing on hard mode unless the analysis specifically requires it to be done on one mode (e.g. a guide to beating a boss on the hard mode, which he did not write as far as I can tell).

[MageTank]

 

[Quackers101]

if ppl have not seen it yet, digital book stores are spammed with books now and are a lot in the top 1000's? oof

[LAwLz]

2 hours ago, Quackers101 said:

if ppl have not seen it yet, digital book stores are spammed with books now and are a lot in the top 1000's? oof

Some fairly big website was in the news for getting caught writing articles using generative AI. The only problem with this discovery was that they had been doing it for several months before they got caught, and they only got caught once they started labeling their article author as being an AI. For the first months it was some nondescript "author" like "staff" or whatever.

 

 

The website "futurism" seems to be pumping out a ton of anti-AI articles. They have published 19 negative articles about AI in the last two weeks. That's more than twice a day. 

[StDragon]

4 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Some fairly big website was in the news for getting caught writing articles using generative AI. The only problem with this discovery was that they had been doing it for several months before they got caught, and they only got caught once they started labeling their article author as being an AI. For the first months it was some nondescript "author" like "staff" or whatever.

 

 

The website "futurism" seems to be pumping out a ton of anti-AI articles. They have published 19 negative articles about AI in the last two weeks. That's more than twice a day. 

The Infocalypse could turn out to be a good thing; a final push that shoves everyone off the ledge. For awhile now, people have been spammed with crap and slammed with fake news and click-bait articles. Now that will be amplified x 1000+.

So what will the internet become? Rather than wasting time blacklisting content and feeds, the internet culture will turn to whitelisting instead with the presumption almost everything will either be fake or exaggerated.