"Crush!"

On the AI-abetted death of VICE and Apple’s handy new visual metaphor for the campaign to squeeze human works into commoditized output paste

A few lessons from this week:

Do not underestimate the viability of cheap, generative-AI produced content. Do not underestimate the desperation, or the cravenness, of those who create or embrace it as a business strategy. Do not underestimate tech companies’ willingness to surface or promote such content over that of the work of humans — work on which the AI content has been or will soon be trained. Relatedly, do not be surprised that a tech company now feels comfortable advertising the destruction of human creativity itself, because it wants to sell you an iPad.

On Wednesday, Futurism dropped an investigation into AdVon, a company that produces AI-generated content for newspapers and outlets around the web. AdVon has or has had deals with publications including the Hollywood Reporter, Mashable, USA Today, the Sacramento Bee (my hometown paper growing up), the LA Times, (my former employer), and, most notably, Sports Illustrated.

You might recall when the most famous sports magazine in American history got caught publishing AI-generated stories by AI-generated authors; AdVon was the company behind the AI blogs. It was a minor scandal, and for a minute, I thought there was a decent chance that would be the end of it, at least for now. This stuff was so bad that I felt there was no way the market could bear it, that readers would revolt, that publishers with any self-respect would be shamed into banishing such auto-made tripe.

While it’s true that readers hate the output paste, I was orders of magnitude too optimistic. Lots of outlets are still using this thing.

Turns out I’d overlooked two key factors: #1. Human readers too often rank depressingly low in the equation here — these are not stories but AI-generated commodity units that are engineered to register on search engines and attract the attention of the algorithms of social media platforms. They are designed to surface affiliate links to products, or to bolster the SEO of a page listing another product, or to go viral on Facebook before anyone really knows what’s happening. Tech companies spent the last 20 years building web infrastructure that tries to feed you what you want to see, and generative AI is the means du jour to automate the checking of all those boxes necessary to get it there. And Google, which controls 90% of the search market, seems content to let it all happen.

Then there’s #2: Enough media executives and boards of directors genuinely do not give a shit, and are all to happy to turn the keys over to an all-but-automated content farm if there’s a chance they’ll see some short-term profit, even if it utterly destroys the readability and credibility of the editorial operation. They just don’t care anymore, or are exhausted by the prospect of trying to make “doing good journalism” or “publishing interesting writing” financially viable in 2024, or never really cared much to begin with.

This is how you wind up with Vice, where I worked for a decade or so in varying capacities, and, for all its many faults, was at least aggressively interested in writing with and about humanity — on the verge of turning into a full-blown AI-generated content farm.

“Our collection of brands guide millions of individuals to decisions.” Savage Ventures’ bio page.

After laying off hundreds of employees just months ago, the single conference room’s worth of executives now known as Vice Media has struck a deal to hand the keys over to a “venture operations” firm called Savage Ventures. This firm will effectively now be running Motherboard, as well as Noisey, Munchies, and Vice.com, none of whom currently employ any writers, since they were all, you know, laid off.

Fortunately for what remains of Vice’s leadership, Savage appears to have a penchant for churning out low grade and AI-generated content. A quick tour through its portfolio of web offerings, which include something called MyDrHank, domain name jackpot Outdoors.com, the weight loss supplement-hocking 247 Health, is utterly depressing. The hope is surely that Savage can use Vice’s presumably primo page rankings to further juice its business of auto-slopping blogs stuffed with affiliate links and autoplay ads into every available pore online and squeeze a little more value from its corpse before it fully biodegrades.

And die and disappear it will: A source with knowledge of the Savage deal tells me that they’re planning to start quietly removing stories from the archive, if they haven’t already, in preparation of pumping out brand-friendly content. I’ve also heard that efforts were launched from Shane Smith and others to try to buy back the company — and staff it again with real humans — and came up short. Also note that laying off the unionized staff and then restarting the operation with venture money and a skeleton crew is very likely an unfair labor practice; calls for the National Labor Relations Board to investigate are already percolating.

Now, there have to be literally hundreds of thousands of words written in service of uncovering What Went Wrong At Vice at this point — relentless, unsustainable expansion, clueless management, toxicity, and some very bad bets, like on a cable TV channel in the 2010s, seem to top out the speculations; I’d add Google and Facebook’s stranglehold on digital ad revenue the platforms orgs like Vice had to live on — but for our purposes today, I’m more interested in what happens next.

However it wound up a wheezing zombie, let us consider the fact that the board chose not to preserve what was interesting, even vital (there are not exactly a ton of widely read publications covering the Palestinian perspective of the atrocities in Gaza, for one thing) about Vice — but to opt for the lowest-common denominator cash grab. To opt for hooking up some tubes to the corpse to churn out the content paste.

Think I’m exaggerating? Here’s the guy who bought it, talking about his vision for media — built with as few ‘users’ as possible, so he can maximize profits — with all the enthusiasm of a morgue technician.

(Hat tip to Ethan Gach for sharing the video.)

Utterly depressing.

There’s mountains of painstaking work, so many weird stunts, so much truly singular human labor piled up in there; and the board just decided to give up on the entire endeavor because having someone press the ‘generate text’ button is easier and lower-risk.

In cases like this I often think of this time I was walking through the Lower East Side in Manhattan by all the shops and restaurants and whatnot. I was passing by this empty lot between two buildings, and a guy had stopped to turn to who he was walking with and he said ‘oh man, you could put a parking lot there!’ and his partner kind of nodded. He’s not wrong, it would probably make a lot of money, and it was just some idle passing thought so I’m reluctant to pick on this random faceless guy. But too often people thinking like this run the world: People who see an available space, even if it is surrounded by culture and promise and flourishing, and their first instinct is to think, what is the dullest, most surefire way I can convert this into a revenue stream.

People like this made the call to take a vital organization staffed by hundreds of creative, ambitious, and interesting people, send them all packing, and sell the freshly vacated real estate to someone who plans to use it to optimize for profits with as few users as possible. And yet again we’re left with a modern example of what automation by AI looks like in practice: It’s not a robot army rising up to replace us with superior intelligence and aptitude, it’s a shitty text-generated swamp that we sink into when the vagaries of capital have already undermined an institution to the brink of collapse.

If the new Vice looks anything like Savage Venture’s other sites, then it will be fair to say that Vice’s staff was automated away. Like Sports Illustrated before it. And CNET. And Buzzfeed News. And who knows how many more to come.

They were crushed. Squeezed on one end by conditions created by tech giants — Google and Facebook more than anyone — that sapped the life (and advertising revenues) out of journalism and media institutions, and delivered the coup de grace by tech giants with new innovations on the other: competing products that can generate text on demand, for dirt cheap.

With all that as context, I think it’s pretty easy to understand why so many people revolted over Apple’s instantly-infamous ad this week, a spot called “Crush!”, which features a giant industrial press smashing beautiful instruments of human creation and replacing them with an iPad.

The ad was lambasted from so many angles — it failed to read the room, it celebrates the destruction of art and human creation at a time when lots of people feel those very things are in the crosshairs of tech companies, it was just bad, dour marketing — that the tech giant was forced to issue a rare mea culpa. In the decade and a half I’ve been covering tech, I’ve never seen anything like this level of backlash to an Apple spot.

On the one hand it is really wild to me that Apple would miscalculate on something so drastically — Apple prides itself on its marketing, which is as crucial to the company as any of its technologies — but on the other, I’m thankful. The ad has clarified some things: amid (yet another) week in which human writers and artists were watching their work degraded into content fodder, Apple came along and handed us a perfect visual metaphor for one of our most potent fears about big tech right now — namely, that it is crushing the arts and transmuting them into dull consumer products. And, I might add, they are so content with what they are doing, that they are more than happy to broadcast that intent explicitly via advertising — signed off on by the highest echelons of Apple, and Tim Cook himself tweeting it out — with an exclamation point in the title. “Crush!” indeed.

To put an even finer point on all this, at one point this week I was quite literally toggling between reading criticism of the iPad spot and watching a Zoom feed of Andersen v. Stability AI, where a judge was hearing the case brought by artists who allege that AI companies like Stability, Midjourney, and Runway have infringed on their copyrights, by training their AI models on art they produced. These artists’ ability to earn a living — doing the kind of art that Apple is crushing in its ad — has been imperiled by tech companies who’ve trained their models on their work and are now selling the output for cheap.

One might even say that, metaphorically, what Midjourney and OpenAI and the rest are doing is compacting, compressing, and threatening to destroy a good deal of artistic production by feeding into some giant machinery, and transmuting it into a consumer product that profits them.

When I tweeted about the Apple ad, and the tweet started getting passed around a lot, presumably because many people felt the same way, I nonetheless got a bunch of responses from folks accusing me of taking it too seriously, can’t you see it’s a metaphor, a joke? My first instinct was to respond — I’m not mad, I just think it was really dumb on Apple’s part, don’t you see the self-effacing ‘lol’ in my tweet?? — but that’s not really true. I am mad. I am mad that vital human institutions and practices are being threatened, contorted, disrupted, killed off, that hundreds or thousands of people doing this kind of work are unemployed, are fighting for their right to earn a living, because a handful of tech companies have seen fit to profit at their expense, no matter the human cost.

You could say I’m crushed.

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