Nilay Patel

The third student at UTMB said the email from the school was frustrating because it was unclear which comments the university found problematic.

“We’ve been left wondering exactly what it was they objected to,” the student said. “That vagueness just leads to some more self-censorship, since it’s hard to tell what is and isn’t allowed.”

So I took matters into my own hands, and created rudimentary specimens for each of Microsoft’s five new typefaces (and Calibri to boot). A–Z in upper- and lowercase, 0–9, and the most common punctuation marks. Then a paragraph of sample text at 11 points. Dear reader, you really owe me for this one, because I had to use the web app version of Word, by way of Microsoft 365 to produce these PDFs. To describe this software as brutal and frustrating is an understatement. Herewith, the PDF specimens, and my brief comments.

Most of what I have written is fairly obvious — this is not an original doomsday scenario. Only a dozen years ago, Demand Media ran “content farms” and went public. It used cheap labor to flood the web with generic websites with fallow information to farm ad dollars. Its main rival, Associated Content, was acquired by Yahoo. Those two companies were pioneers of shallow content and created headaches for legitimate websites and normal people looking for information. It took a while for even Google to beat them back. [...]

Where does fresh content come from in the future? Will we even be incentivized to create something new? Or all future AI refinements be based on erroneous pseudo-babble on social networks like Twitter and Reddit?

And for at least a few days, Google ranked Gizmodo’s machine-made output among the top results for “star wars movies” queries. That’s something Brown noted when he told me that he’s learned that AI content “will, at least for the moment, be well-received by search engines.”