Rising Tide of AI Generated Content Seeping Into My News Aggregator

I am an avid consumer of content via my news aggregator, Feedly. Newspaper articles, trade journal stories, blog posts, academic pieces and more, all filtered into folders for easy reading.

Over the last twenty years I have read stories, articles and posts to learn, for blogging and sharing on social media. By doing so, I am confident I have made a difference in other’s lives. I know I have made a difference in mine.

It’s disheartening to witness a trend I can’t help but notice — the growing sea of content which I can’t identify as being written by journalists – citizen or mainstream. Much of it is poorly written, some of which publishers are calling junk.

Scrolling through my Feedly folders is proving to be tougher and more time consuming.

I have to believe that AI, in its rapid advancement and use by some to draw traffic to their content websites, is the cause for this poor content.

Through a series of prompts or a short conversation with ChatGPT, non-subject matter experts can kick out articles that can “sound” okay.

But when you look in LinkedIn and Google for the names of the reporters and editors on some web publications and can’t find them, you realize it’s all a facade.

More than once I’ve been on the verge of sharing a piece laying out information that would be of help to my followers. My personal credibility, something that would be hard to get back, holds me in check.

In time, we could see an erosion of trust, something particularly harmful for fields such as the law, where reliable information, insight and commentary is critically important.

My gut tells me things are going to get worse before they get better. In time though the tech platforms are going to develop systems to identify the validity of content and the reputation of the publishers.

We’re also likely to see a growing body of legal information and insight as legal professionals learn how to properly and effectively use AI as an assistant or copilot in their writing.

For now, I’ve developed a method for getting the best of the journalism I am looking for. I’ll share what I am doing, tomorrow.