We see them all the time on social media, not memes which are a by-product of social media, but lists, a creation of humanity’s need for order and context as old as hieroglyphics on the walls of caves.
Lists of best or worst: states to visit, cities to live, highways to travel, plants to grow, vitamins to take, and so on. Many begin with “Most”: healthy foods, wealthy celebrities, popular movies, successful sports teams, party-prone colleges, risky occupations, also on and on. Others begin with “Top” or “Favorite”: years for automobile sales, rock-and-roll guitarists, coffee producing countries, sandwiches in each state, and on and on and on.
Not to press the matter, but I can’t help but mention highly specified lists such as–and no, I am not making this up–“Stadiums with lighthouses within a 25-mile radius.” Finally, the Mets win something!
All of it click-bait for the ads they carry, as I learned early on. A few years back I couldn’t resist one ranking state capitols as places to live. I’ve lived in three, all of them high on the list. When I sent it to a long-ago friend from Bismarck, North Dakota, then living in Salem, Oregon (two of mine, the other being Denver), she returned a dry thank you with the complaint that the site should offer the bare list to be viewed all at once.
I agreed. Of course, the whole point of the paragraph or two or three is to stretch the list for the sake of ads. Various scientists as well as marketing experts would call any such list a “delivery system” for as many ads as they think we can stand–or withstand.
So, with the exception of a few such as US presidents ranked according to height or weight, I’ve done well to avoid these lists–until last week when I spotted “Worst books we read in high school ranked from bad to terrible.”
No way this former English teacher could scroll past that. If nothing else, I knew I’d get a good laugh at flippant descriptions of every novel I ever read and avoided reading (courtesy of Cliff Notes) through high school and college.
When the brief intro promised a range from “the long-winded adventures in The Deerslayer to the complex friendships in A Separate Peace,” I knew that every classic ever assigned in high school would be dismissed on one of those two grounds. Proving my point immediately were two John Steinbeck novels in the high 30s, but is East of Eden ever assigned in high schools? Did someone somehow mistake those 700 pages for the high school staple, Of Mice and Men?
Despite my expectation, Animal Farm‘s inclusion shocked me. Text posits that students would have to know history to understand the allegory, but an allegory always stands on his own, and I recall a high school class of 1968 that laughed all through it and for days after the assignment. Film adaptations appeared in 1955 and 1999, and in 2017 the book became a video game.
To Kill a Mocking Bird at 26 proves that the list is bogus, the product of a writer with no clue of how young people read or how literature is taught on any level. A more shocking entry is Lolita at 22. What high school teacher ever assigned that? But by that time, I was scrolling rapidly–the text as repetitive as predicted–to confirm what I knew would be number one as soon as I read the intro.
“Long winded” and “complex”? No way that prize goes to any book not named Moby-Dick.
Right again! After reading that my favorite novel “veers into the labyrinthine (sic)” and “leaves many readers adrift in a sea of boredom,” I couldn’t resist bragging about my foresight and so I sent it to my editor, Helen Highwater, who had this to say:
That list, written by “Rachel B,” scares me. Almost certainly “written” by an AI. (Was Lolita ever assigned to a high school class?)
I’m at the point that any piece of ad-delivery web-crap that ends with “You May Also Like” non-sequitur click-bait, published in a nearly anonymous generic site, is an AI suspect.
That never occurred to me. I answered:
I did blink at Lolita, but just kept going. And how could Catcher in the Rye possibly be on a “worst” list for high-schoolers? AI authorship would explain how parts of each one seemed interchangeable with others. Might even explain the glaring confusion of “labyrinthine” for “labyrinth.”
Also wondered how “Works by Charles Dickens” gained an entry. Did the machine have so many Dickens titles to process that it just vomited a catch-all? A deliberate twist to Twist?
Helen filled me in:
I heard an audio report recently about an industry growing up around purchasing abandoned, expired website addresses when they come up for auction, then populating them with AI content. The report authors contacted one such entrepreneur who was willing to talk about it.
I think the guy was in Croatia or Serbia. He claimed to be a pop musician and DJ, well known in his country, who had heard about this business model, and decided he’d try investing in some sites to see if he could generate income. He said he still makes more money from his music gigs, but that he’s not losing money on the websites. Once they are set-up, the AI does all the work.
When asked about the ethics of it, he said he doesn’t worry much about things like that. He claims his initiatives are not intentionally harmful, that he does feel a little guilt about how some of the sites are drawing in fans of the original (economically failed) sites, but that he’s not really tricking anyone to keep coming back.
Not me. I’ve learned my lesson. This has taught me to make up my own lists, and write accompanying BS text that is at least plausible. If nothing else, I’ll satisfy my need to express myself, a need as old as hieroglyphics on the walls of caves.
-30-
A story that summarizes the “business model”:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/06/27/1075545/next-gen-content-farms-ai-generated-text-ads
AI’s 40 Worst List:
Mouth of the River 
Yup, from my favorite spoken word artist
LikeLike