Famous YouTuber Calls Out [This Platform] for AI Content

Over 75K people (in its first few hours) just watched a popular YouTuber slam this platform, and he wasn’t wrong

I was listening to a standup comedian on YouTube, minding my own business (for once) — and I heard [this platform’s] name mentioned. Well, I perked up like someone just dosed with Narcan. This platform was being ridiculed. That hurt.

Comedian Isaac Butterfield, who I am a long-time fan of, came across a Medium article and said this in his video today:

“From medium.com, why waking up early is rooted in white supremacy…ah, good…great journalism”.

In case you missed it, that was dripping in sarcasm from this Aussie comedian. This smart motherfucker correctly calls out the article as AI when he said:

“What the fuck even is journalism anymore, what the fuck Medium.com you lazy [bleep sound].”

I think he said lazy cunt, it would be on-brand for him — and in my opinion appropriate and deserved.

“Hey, I know how to use ChatGPT, why don’t I become a fucking journalist for Medium.com…These websites are so desperate for people to click on their shit articles that they’re not even paying people to write them anymore they’re just putting something stupid, ridiculous, dumb like fucking waking up early is white supremecy or desks are racists into ChatGPT, the AI system produces it and you click on it, I make a video on it they make heaps of money, and we’ve been fucking duped”

And this clever cunt is spot-fucking-on. He then ironically goes on to plug his merch.

Here’s his video. Uh, trigger warning if you’re someone who says “I’m offended” or “I’m triggered” a lot. Definitely don’t watch his other videos if you’re vegan.

Who cares what some comedian thinks right? Well, in its first 12 hours this video has 75K views, and it is likely to make it over half a million, since many of his videos do. Isaac’s sarcastic and profane ass is merely one example of the reputation this platform is getting.

Google Agrees

Want a bigger example? How about Google?

Yup, the first thing that comes up on Google is that “we welcome the responsible use of AI-assistive technology”, as quoted by The Verge. That quote came directly from Scott Lamb, Medium’s VP of content.

Why do we “welcome” AI? If not from an external street-cred perspective, at least from an internal one. I think I speak for most when I say we don’t want to read AI content. It’s grammatically-polished poppycock.

‘But Robin, AI-written articles don’t get airtime on Medium.’

Yes, they do.

That article mentioned in Isaac’s video has 132 comments on it over the 4 months it has been around.

At least only 42 people clapped for it? Only 6 people stated that they know it is a ChatGPT-written (or other AI) article though — which means that over 95% of people may not have realized it was from ChatGPT.

Here is one comment from today, from a rather aptly-named new user:

‘Nuff said?

AI ‘Disclaimers’ are Bullshit

‘But we have to have a disclaimer’, yada yada. In The Verge’s article they quoted Scott Lamb saying “[a disclaimer] allows them to choose their own reaction to, and engagement with, this kind of work, and clearly understand whether a story is machine- or human-written.”

A disclaimer is that little sentence at the end of the article that says ‘haha — I tricked you into reading this dumpster fire’. I might have paraphrased that a little, oopsy doopsy.

If you click on that article, there is no disclaimer that AI wrote the dang thing. If anyone thinks most AI content here has a disclaimer, I have some magic beans to sell you.

Medium asking people to use disclaimers is like when your grandma winked at you while she turned her back on the cookie jar. Except now grandma is a(n evil?) cyborg trying to take over the world.

Disclaimers are bullshit. I’ve said it before — and I’ll keep banging this digital drum, Medium needs a harder stance against AI. Scott did say this was an initial approach to AI. Errrr Scott, I’ll quote The Lion King’s Rafiki…‘It is time’.

Banning AI Ain’t Easy

I’m aware that banning AI content isn’t easy. AI content detectors aren’t perfect and can have more false positives than a Maury Povich ‘You Are The Father’ video. However, if 100% of the article comes up at 90%+ probability for AI, can we agree to collectively raise an eyebrow?

Screenshot from copyleaks.com’s AI content detector. Crossplag.com’s had the same result.

The problem is Medium is not only not even trying to get rid of AI content — they WELCOME it.

Is Medium too busy worrying about things like The Boost, the changing the color of our stats to baby-vomit green, and censoring meta content to do anything about AI? The reason I used “This Platform” in square brackets in my title by the way is that they don’t seem to be showing anything with Medium in the title in the feed anymore.

So…AI-written, racist, clickbait content can get more airtime here than an article like this one. Or more than one of the many, many other articles that are better than what this sprinkletits fuckwit comes up with.

Medium, we have enough to compete with from The Boost usurping a lot of the views. We shouldn’t be competing with this poppycock for an audience.

Can we stop welcoming AI with a hug and a cookie —and give it a punch in the dick instead?