A terrific investigation by Maggie Harrison Dupre at Futurism delves into AdVon, the AI company that rose to prominence when it emerged it had produced content for Sports Illustrated and USA Today.

The piece is worth reading and digesting in full. It goes into detail about the capabilities of these tools as it stands today. What’s most alarming is the breadth of publications that AdVon is said to have worked with. Dupre writes:

We found the company's phony authors and their work everywhere from celebrity gossip outlets like Hollywood Life and Us Weekly to venerable newspapers like the Los Angeles Times, the latter of which also told us that it had broken off its relationship with AdVon after finding its work unsatisfactory.

And after we sent detailed questions about this story to McClatchy, a large publisher of regional newspapers, it also ended its relationship with AdVon and deleted hundreds of its pieces — bylined by at least 14 fake authors — from more than 20 of its papers, ranging from the Miami Herald to the Sacramento Bee.

And it may be even more widespread than that:

An earlier, archived version of its site bragged that its publishing clients included the Ziff Davis titles PC Magazine, Mashable and AskMen (Ziff Davis didn't respond to questions about this story) as well as Hearst's Good Housekeeping (Hearst didn't respond to questions either) and IAC's Dotdash Meredith publications People, Parents, Food & Wine, InStyle, Real Simple, Travel + Leisure, Better Homes & Gardens and Southern Living (IAC confirmed that Meredith had a relationship with AdVon prior to its 2021 acquisition by Dotdash, but said it'd since ended the partnership.)

The good news is — it seems just about every publication that tried AdVon decided the quality was not good enough. The bad news is so many seemed willing to try, and the technology will only get better when more serious AI players turn their attention to a bespoke tool to write “journalism.”

Here’s another thought: Dotdash Meredith this week announced it had reached a content deal with OpenAI. Surely at some point the dog catches its tail here? Those content deals won’t last for long if publications start publishing AI generated articles. The value is the human.

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