My original, editorialized title: Ars Technica Sells Out
Linking to this because I know people here read Ars Technica, and I totally didn’t become a subscriber three days before this was announced. Nope. No sir.
I am going to stop reading them myself.
It’s not so much ideological than practical, I simply don’t have the time to fact check them, or figure out which are the real articles and which are the AI ones, etc etc
That’s not what’s happening. The AI is ingesting the human made content (articles and comments). It isn’t writing any of the content of the site. I’m just going to cancel my subscription if they don’t give me a means to opt out of my comments feeding ChatGPT
Damnit! I still like and respect the Ars Technica staff but Condé Nast can piss off.
I feel for you KingThrillgore. I was thinking of supporting the site with a subscription but not after this. Still if enough people stop subscribing we may loose them altogether. This is a double edged shit sword.
I made it clear in my comment I was not happy about this after I became a subscriber. It will not auto-renew. If I had done it with a credit card and not Paypal, I’d try for a chargeback.
For what its worth, nobody else active on the site is happy about this, either. Lots of unsubscribes are being claimed in the comments (including mine).
Edit: and a comment from the EIC says CN will not share revenue from OpenAI with Ars Technica. Incredible. They’re basically getting nothing out of it.
Fuck those shitheads.
The main problem now is that Ars Technica and all other Conde Nast publications, with it now having a vested interest in openAI (they’re getting paid by them), can no longer be reliably trusted to report on any AI or AI-adjacent topic whatsoever. And every user comment and content is now owned by openAI.
I bet MFCBot would work super well if it was updated to report on if the publication’s owners had a vested interest in the topic.
Oh it would. It would require the MFC site itself to actually collect and collate data on site’s parent company investment portfolios and that’s a pretty massive ask from what sounds like a very tiny team.
I wonder if it could somehow pull that data from somewhere like ground news somehow
I’m not so sure Ars has a vested interest in OpenAI. I actually read through 10 pages of comments. Ken Fisher was pretty active in them, and noted several times that Ars doesn’t see any of the money from this deal.
Ars does not. Their chief editor has said as much. But Conde Nast absolutely does, and it WILL happen where CN will start telling Ars what they can and can’t do, because that’s how corporate ownership works. It happens every single time without fail, and that is why you can no longer trust anything they post related to AI. You toe the line to capital’s interest, or CN is gonna eject you from the org.
Conde Nast doesn’t have an interest in driving away their readers, and AI bullshit absolutely will drive them away. They know this. Ken Fisher is the editorial lead for AI at Conde Nast (not just Ars), and said as much in the comment section.
AI is absolutely fucking things up on a grand scale in all sorts of industries, but as of right now, Ars is relatively safe and I don’t think we need to inflate the scale of the danger.
what’s the problem here? openai isn’t pirating content if they pay for it,? have i misunderstood something
