CNET just laid off more staff. Editor-in-chief moved to focus on AI content strategy.

[highplainsdem]

https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/2/23622231/cnet-layoffs-ai-articles-seo-red-ventures

Just weeks after news broke that tech site CNET was quietly using artificial intelligence to produce articles, the company is doing extensive layoffs that include several longtime employees, according to multiple people with knowledge of the situation. The layoffs total around a dozen people, a CNET staffer says, or about 10 percent of the public masthead.

CNET editor in chief Connie Guglielmo will also step down from her role and become the senior vice president of AI content strategy and editor-at-large, according to a draft blog post circulated internally and obtained by The Verge. She will be replaced by Adam Auriemma, former editor in chief of another Red Ventures-owned outlet, NextAdvisor. NextAdvisor appears to have shut down; it hasn’t tweeted since January, its website now redirects to CNET, and it no longer appears on Red Ventures’ list of brands.

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In January, Futurism reported that CNET had published dozens of articles since last November that were generated using AI tools, much to the surprise of readers — the outlet hadn’t formally announced it was doing so. Other Red Ventures-owned properties, Bankrate and CreditCards.com, had also been publishing similar pieces. The company paused the practice after public outcry and factual errors in stories and promised to do an audit of all articles using AI systems. On CNET, more than half of the articles eventually had corrections made to them.

Though the AI-generated stories were put on pause in January, Red Ventures is preparing to deploy the tool again soon, according to an internal meeting held in late February, first reported by Futurism and confirmed by The Verge. In her new role, Guglielmo will work on machine learning strategies across Red Ventures, according to the memo circulated today. The news is expected to be announced tomorrow.

-snip-

The people in charge at CNET simply don't care about stories with major mistakes in them.

[highplainsdem]

1. Btw, this article in The Verge explains that CNET gets as much web traffic as

it does because of a high "authority" metric at Google.

I would hope that its publishing AI-written stories with lots of inaccuracies - mistakes that aren't corrected till exposed by other publications - would tank that "authority" rating.