Books and Crooks
Hey, You
To the AI Spammers who subscribed to get my stories by email
Hey, you cool and handsome ones that subscribe to get my stories by email. Thanks for opening your inbox and clicking through to find yourselves back here. Especially those of you joining the ranks of my dubious fan club as recently as this week. By god, there have been many of you.
You’ve followed me out of the blue, and subscribed to get my stories sent right to your inbox. I’m flattered! I’ve been writing on Medium since December 2022. You are joining the ranks of roughly 200 fellow travelers who I presume enjoy the hot takes I have on Burger King’s Hot Mac’n’Cheetohs. I’m very proud of that one, and I hope you read it.
But I admit to being quite flummoxed by your presence here, newbie. You have been a member since just this month it seems. Yet your following is astronomical already; in the tens of thousands! What a meteoric rise you have achieved! I would congratulate you on such a feat, were it not for the fact that — and I’m very sorry to be unkind — your writing is not very good.
Second Verse, Same as the Worst
I published the above essay three months ago, and it showcases how easily flummoxed I am. For in it, you will see that my charitable assumptions are rich enough to put the United Way to shame. When faced with very obvious AI drivel, cynically slopped onto the platform with the sole motivation of making money, I tried hard to engage with it from the position of the end-of-world-curious rather than full-on sandwich-board-wearing soapbox aficionado.
Today, consider me a permanent fixture of your busiest downtown street corner. I cry out henceforth that the AI-pocalypse is here for the real writers on Medium. And this platform will go out not with a bang, but with a whinge. At least, assuming Medium doesn’t step in and make good on a very recent promise they’ve made. More on that later.
But first, I need to correct and expand my previous take on the matter of low-effort prompt-kiddies ruining Medium.
Medium Shills
Esda Ella — unlikely the real name of a real person — disgorges insipid three-paragraph summaries of sixty-year-old novels written by a dead man, following each with two whole paragraphs encouraging you to buy them through Amazon affiliate links. And when I say insipid, I mean the absolute dregs of nutrition.
I didn’t understand what their end goal was, but it turns out, they make money when you buy stuff through their links. Doesn’t matter that they chose Vonnegut of all people. You buy Vonnegut books and they profit. So I’m a little behind on what Amazon Affiliates are, sue me.
They’ve moved on to Philip K. Dick now, at least! So they have a logical trajectory going for them, coldly rote and machine-like as it is.
I feared naming and linking the profile in question in my original essay for admittedly cowardly reasons. Not that I doubted my assessment this person isn’t real; their profile picture is very cannily not a human being as we know the species on Earth. But I wasn’t sure if such things are a violation of Medium’s TOS when calling someone out.
Then I realized, hey! These gremlins are all violating the Terms of Service, so it must be fair game! Just as well, I made $5 on Bitcoin last month. I’m willing to roll these dice at least once.
Bam! Right there under Medium’s first rule against “Spam or Site Misuse”:
Posting content primarily to drive traffic to, or increase the search rankings of, an external site, product, or service
Get the hell outta my town, Esda! And don’t let me ever catch you telling people one of the darkest and most existential novels ever written is a “lighthearted choice for beginners” again!
Anyway, it’s a good thing I identified this as the worst to come after the content mill bloat consisting of daily hustle culture and self-help listicles that was Medium’s 2022. Right?
“The Content Mill Bloat of 2022 was Just the Beginning” was Just the Beginning
Donkodech Hahngeh bucks the very idea that a writer must find a niche. They also dispense with most other earthly constraints on the craft such as writing from personal experience or expertise, original research, drawing parallels to make a unified point, making a point at all, or saying anything insightful whatsoever.
Well, this profile has one thing going for it, besides finding and following me. Look at their followers, both how many they have and how many they follow. Look at their output. And look at when they joined Medium. This is an absurd level of productivity. Not even John Henry, born to this Earth straight from his mama’s womb with a Steel Series keyboard in his hand, could keep up with that!
It would be difficult to detail in short form the con at play here. A critical glance at this robot’s catalog reveals what should be at least patently obvious. Once a week they log in — arms loaded with the bounty of the AI drivel mines they slave away in — and cast on their front page roughly twenty lukewarm, soggy links.
You can only tell they are individual units at the seams, where subtle variations in the titles draw hazy lines. Otherwise, the similar topics and identical featured images give the impression of a great, soft, jelly-thing. It has no mouth, and it must scream.
What makes me scream, however, is all the sweet, sweet engagement this gelatinous mass of turds manages to reap. More than my more evocative prose, I jealously admit. Some of it even seems genuine. Putting on my skeptic hat, however, I would bet dollars to donuts that these people are coming by way of mutual engagement rings. Y’know; content farming Facebook groups.
To put it to you straight; this stuff is not written by a human. It’s easy to pop open ChatGPT, tell it to generate twenty headlines about the topic du jour, then take each one and say “Write an essay from the point of the view of a blogger on insert-headline-here, and punch up the humanity.” The results are devoid of any value. I can’t get through more than a few paragraphs without entering an anesthetic fog. Yes, good job ChatGPT. You know the five senses of taste. We fucking all do.
Look, I’m not telling people what to like. It is, however, important to point out that reading this person’s content to learn something isn’t possible. It’s like reading the little fun fact trivia on the back of a cereal box about, I dunno…octopuses. Actually, it’s more like mushing up the cereal box and eating it before saying a little prayer that hopefully the experience will bring you closer to understanding octopuses on an elemental level in the sense that they also eat human garbage as it saturates the ocean, their home.
Did that absurd comparison make you laugh? Well good! It was a blast to write! It’s fun to write stupid stuff. Who would have thought that it was fun to read and write things ourselves?
No Such Thing as a Free Lunch, Only Stolen Ones
Okay, so why do I care? And why should you care?
You may already know this stuff, but grant me a bit of third-act exposition. Medium is a platform made first and foremost for readers and writers. Anyone can sign up and publish on Medium, and anyone can technically read anything they want on Medium. There are some big names here like Scott Galloway and Barack Obama. Many book authors maintain a presence here. You’ll also notice a singular absence of ads.
Medium is completely ad-free. Rather than taking ad money, the platform has the Membership System. How does one become a member? It’s very simple; do you have $50 in your wallet? Give it to CEO Tony and boom, you’re a member. Just last year they added another level called “Friend of Medium”. How does one become a friend of Medium? It’s simple; do you have about $200 in your wallet? Well just like making friends in real life, give that money to Tony, and boom, you’re friends.
These subscriptions, paid monthly or annually, are what fund Medium. As a member/friend you can now read all the content available. Many journals and news rags like the Times and Atlantic have moved to this online subscription model, and if you value good journalism you should consider paying for at least one that you like, ideally a local one, to avoid the paywall and support the mission of real writers. Unless you got no scruples, in which case you can just look up how to get around that shit.
But you wouldn’t download a Wall Street Journal, would you?
The money from these subscriptions goes to running Medium as an ad-free platform, but it’s also used to incentivize writers to produce interesting, engaging content that will in turn encourage more people to subscribe. This is called the Partner Program, and how your earnings as a writer are calculated is arcane and unknowable.
(Let me drop a note right here that I do not care one bit about my earnings, if I did I would write more populist trash or use ChatGPT to produce twenty articles at a time for me, rather topically. I write for my own amusement and ideally the amusement of others.)
How does one enter the Partner Program? It’s simple; are you a member or friend of Medium? Boom, you can be in the program, and immediately begin paywalling your content. This is what I meant when I said you can technically read everything on Medium; non-members can see only a limited number of paywalled articles each month. The value of getting past the paywall is entirely predicated on the content published to Medium being of value to read.
It used to be that you needed at least a hundred followers in order to enter the program, but that was dumb so they changed it last year.
Anyway, once you’ve paywalled some of your articles, other intellectuals and actors of consequence who are members can engage with them and, if you earn enough good boy engagement points, you’ll get paid. Monthly. To a stripe account.
In a vacuum, this wouldn’t matter. Except we’ve established that — while impossible to calculate future earnings based on a real, earthly equation for lack of being given one — it is incredibly easy to paywall your content and start earning immediately. Passively. All you need is engagement. And that’s what these productivity pirates are here for.
If an annual membership is $50, and they produce hundreds of paywalled articles in a year with even moderate engagement, then they will certainly make their money back and, likely, a small profit. It’s a “passive income” grift, except instead of shitty Amazon ebooks on stoicism, it’s hustle culture and wellness listicles on Medium.
They are here to make money. Producing “content” on Medium is a gig, a side hustle. There is no joy in it. This is how generative AI tools are being used to snatch Medium’s lunch. By mass-producing low-effort swill and farming engagement, these people are, in a very literal sense, stealing money that should be going to genuine writers, as well as keeping Medium ad-free.
ChatGPT, Write a Good Conclusion with a Call to Action
Listen, imaginary content spammer that I am pretending clicked my email link to this article and is still reading, have fun with these new tools. They offer an unprecedented level of accessibility to getting started in the arts. They can help you to write if your goal is to be a writer. Anyone can learn to write, in the same way you can learn to draw and sing and cook.
But they are no substitute for putting in the work of reading real literature and discussing it with real people. Going out and living a real life and writing about that, either privately to better understand your experiences and yourself by extension, or publicly, to offer a unique perspective and insight to your fellow meatbags. AI can help you outline. They cannot give you an outline.
I like Medium. I love Medium! It’s not perfect, but it represents my interests, very human interests, better than any other platform out there. I would love for the people who are churning out this styrofoam-packing-peanut-porridge-ass nonsense to make a quick buck to instead take the time to understand themselves and their lives in a meaningful way and contribute that to the platform legitimately. I would love to engage with that and earn them some money.
Medium needs to take action to protect itself from this outright and obvious theft. That’s what it is, and I’ll say it again; straight burglary. These articles, this “content”, is just a means to claw money out of a system intended to reward real human creatives. It’s possible to do that without AI tools, but AI tools have streamlined the process like Crisco on a water slide. Anyone willing to compromise their own scruples — which is not everyone, but damn if it isn’t too high a number — can jump in and do this.
Thankfully, Medium has taken notice and issued two emails in as many days stating as much. May 1st is the supposed day of reckoning for these spammers. “Medium is for human storytelling, not AI-generated writing.” Bold words, crew. They go on to say:
Beginning May 1, 2024, stories with AI-generated writing (disclosed as such or not) are not allowed to be paywalled as part of our Partner Program.
Accounts that have fully AI-generated writing behind the paywall may have those stories removed from the paywall, and/or have their Partner Program enrollment revoked.
Now that’s a spicy meatball. It tickles me to think my judicious use of the report spam function was the thumb on the scales that led to this little inquisition. That’s right, Tony; tell Esda, I want her to know it was me.
I hope Medium follows through on its promise here because this would be one of the biggest pushbacks against a rising tide of the intellectually incurious stealing creatives’ collective lunch since the writer’s strike last year. May is when I plan to plant a peck of peppers. It’d be nice to do a little weeding while I’m already in the garden.
Update 5/1/2024: Good on you, Medium. Either these nothingburger merchants all up and quit, or Tony torched them out himself. Either way, the accounts that followed me, at least, are all mostly deleted.
Update 8/29/2024: There are still oodles of spammers on Medium, so I’m going to update this article with a link to an illustrative profile in the third section whenever I need to. I see Medium trying to keep up with the spammers, and it’s appreciated. It’s still good to learn how to recognize them. That I could simply change the link and keep the subsequent descriptive text completely intact is a testament, though, to how predictable these things are.
Don’t believe me that it’s “peck” and not “pack” of peppers? Then you should follow me here on Medium, and become a member so you can read about how hating writing is actually the best way to get into writing.
