Stop Hurting Your Fellow Writers, You’re Part of the Problem

How, together, we can bring great writing to prominence. DEP AI vs. HI Book Project.

Brace yourself. Time for some tough love now. First, you need to know that I love you all, I want to comfort you when you’re sad, celebrate with you when you succeed and when you’re in pain I want to blow on the boo-boo to make it go away, but it’s obvious that a large chunk of you are behaving in a manner that is hurting writers here on Medium.

I know, I know, I know; you mean well and to quote an ancient hippy from Bethlehem who was a dab hand at the carpentry:

“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do”

But after reading this article you’ll damn well know exactly what it is you do and if you keep doing it, come December 2024, when Santa’s making his list and checking it twice, you‘re going to find out you’ve been naughty, not nice.

(Tell the truth, you sang that last bit, didn’t you?)

So what is your crime?

You are supporting and promoting AI content publishers on Medium. Hang your heads in shame. Your actions are silencing real writers’ voices and filling everyone’s feeds with subpar, repetitive content. Please, stop it.

How do I know? Because your crime is my crime. Muggins here, your dopey narrator, meaning me, is just as guilty. It was me, your Honour. I am so sorry, I’ll never do it again.

Exposing the AI charlatans

This is how I discovered I had become one of the useful idiots of Medium. A writer I (used to) follow kept popping up on my feed, so I read one of their articles. It was nothing special to read, but then I noticed they’d published 13 articles that day.

Thirteen.

One-three.

In a single day.

There was a mix of poetry and advice articles for readers to peruse. So, with the help of some copying and pasting, I took all these thirteen articles, added them together on a Google Docs document and did a word count. Result: over 3,000 words of published copy.

First of all, Medium is not Twitter, nor do I think you want it to be Twitter (you can call it X if you like, I won’t). So, let’s all agree that no one needs to publish thirteen times a day on Medium. One time? Absolutely. Twice? Why not, rock on with your bad self. Thrice? Hmmm, pushing it there a bit buddy. Thirteen? Hell-to-the-n-to-the-o, Hell no!

Medium is not Twitter, nor do I think you want it to be Twitter (you can call it X if you like, I won’t)

Second, no one, not even Jack Kerouac at his most manic could be so prolific that he would pump out 3,000 words of publishable copy and package them into multiple articles in one day. Not doable, ergo, this is AI-generated drivel.

Medium is shooting itself in the foot

Thanks to AI, people can now push out multiple articles a day, and get rewarded for it by Medium while drowning out those writers who publish less frequently.

By “less” I mean not several times a day. What about the writer who spends a few weeks honing their story, editing, getting it just right for your reading pleasure and then publishing? That’s two stories a month of quality. How do they find new readers when Medium is giving you this AI junk 13 times a day?

The problem is that Medium promotes active posting. The thinking behind this is good: if you post regularly, then you will gain regular readers and regular readers spend time on the platform and will pay to use the platform.

Medium’s rich investors get richer, you get paid 10 bucks a month on Medium, and you can then write articles about how you make 10 bucks a month on Medium; everyone’s happy. It’s a sound idea, but flawed in outcome. People will get bored of spending time on Medium because the articles pushed in front of them are all similar and produced by AI.

Medium’s rich investors get richer, you get paid 10 bucks a month on Medium, and you can then write articles about how you make 10 bucks a month on Medium

I went and looked at the comments for these 13 AI-generated posts, and guess what? Plenty of comments, a proper buzzing beehive of engagement, lots of “thanks for sharing” and “great article” and also some heartfelt and genuine comments. What does all that do? Feeds the algorithm pushing this content to more Medium users. Now, times all this by thirteen for the day and it’s little wonder the “writer” in question has gained a following of over 2,400 in the space of one month.

What you should do to help other writers

It’s more a case of what you must not do.

I’m not saying don’t use AI, if you want to use it, if you feel it helps you, then by all means, have at it, but please do disclose that you used AI to produce your content.

Once you realize that what you’re reading is AI fluff, stop interacting with these AI publishing “writers.” They are charlatans. Even better, block them. The more you clap on their articles, write “thanks for sharing” or support them, the more the Medium algorithm will promote them, dumping more of that junk on my front yard and your front yard.

A thank you to DR Rawson - The Possibilist and Victoria Kjos for inspiring me to write this article, they are true champions of human intelligence.

For more actionable writing rants, subscribe to my Medium stories (I send about one, maybe two, a week).

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✍ — Published by DR Rawson — The Possibilist at Dancing Elephant Press. Click here for guidelines to post click here.