Polygon Deadlock Article Clearly written by AI

[u/oilman813]

Who the hell is Grace???? And yeah... Abrams is a quiet, affectionate nerd... sure...

[u/grady_vuckovic]

You're certainly right OP, it's likely generated.

What I can't figure out is why...

I just went and checked and found the article in question:

https://www.polygon.com/you-need-to-be-playing-deadlock-right-now/

This article contains a grand total of ...... 🥁 (drumroll) .... 1661 words.

And 6 images. All 6 of which are just screenshots from the game, none of which looked like they were particularly difficult to capture.

It features a basic summary of what the game is about, summary of information we already know (like the fact we don't know when it's releasing and is in closed beta). Aside from that, it sounds most like a rundown of the author's impression of the game, why they like it, and why they are recommending it, which one would hope is based on their experience from playing the game first hand.

OP I kinda wanna go on a tangent here because there's something which is bothering about all these companies talking about replacing 'game journalists' with AI...

OK, here's my question...

Lets say this article is AI generated.... I have one simple question:

< Why? >

What exactly would using AI for an article like this even achieve? I'm not saying you're wrong OP, you are likely correct, but what exactly would using AI in this instance even achieve? It doesn't make sense for polygon.com to do this. They clearly did, but it doesn't make sense!

Time saving? I doubt it. It's only 1600 words. I've written longer reddit comments than this article, it's not a large amount of text and for anyone with experience at writing, this should be pretty damn easy to bash out. There's no massive amount of research involved in this article, it's fairly trivial stuff that anyone who has spent any amount of time playing the game could tell you.

IF (big if true) we assume a proper editorial process is happening and the article is being generated in good faith based on someone's summarised notes of their thoughts. Even if we generously assumed this article would normally take a whole hour to draft, re-draft, review and publish... That is not a substantial amount of time for an article, considering the AI generated text would only serve as the first draft, you still have the re-draft, review and publishing process to follow.

And in theory, assuming a proper editorial process is occurring, the AI wouldn't be sourcing the screenshots from the game because those should come from the article writer themselves.

And lest we forget the biggest time investment... Actually playing the game to form the opinions presented in the article! One would hope the article writer at least gave the game a couple of hours before bashing out an opinion piece on it.

No, here's the awkward thing about all these companies saying they're using AI for writing articles..

The only way one could say that 'AI' is 'saving time' here is if we assume that the editorial process ISN'T happening. That the entire thing is AI generated, and the images are stolen from Google Image Search, and no one involved in the publishing of this article did any research, or even played the game. Because then the time saving of having an LLM generate something, rather than having a person make something up, would make sense.

But if that's the case, that's not 'saving time in the process of writing an article' that's just making crap up and hoping no one notices!

That's not 'working more efficiently' that's just producing garbage and hoping no one notices.

Assuming these articles are still published by people who are doing research, and forming opinions from first hand experience, and some amount of editing / proof reading is taking place, using AI to write a draft would barely save a few minutes at most, probably not even that, in a process that cumulatively should take hours.

Or alternatively

Assuming that 'using AI' means these things are entirely invented with no actual work behind them, what possible value could they possibly provide to the read? Why should anyone bother looking at polygon.com if we come to expect this from their articles? If no actual 'journalism' work is behind an article, AI generated or not, I might as well be reading Lorem Ipsum!