Execs at G/O Media, owner of Gizmodo, Jezebel, and others, say the company will publish more AI-generated stories despite blowback for botched first attempts
Why G/O Media thinks we should have more stories written by bots. — In early July, managers at G/O media … Bluesky: @danilo.redeem-tomorrow.com . Twitter: @kylebrussell , @ryanvailbrown , @dkthomp , @pkafka , and @pkafka Bluesky: @danilo.redeem-tomorrow.com : Private equity buying the corpse of Gawker—the most opinionated publisher of its day—and turning it into an AI content mill really captures the sweep of the last technology cycle in one anecdote [embedded post] Twitter: Kyle Russell / @kylebrussell : I'm as AI-forward as they come but they've been doing room temperature IQ moves here These tools should be adopted bottom up by people trying to do great work, not imposed by management without editorial direction @ryanvailbrown : it's important to understand that the executive leadership at G/O can't see more than a few feet in front of themselves, let alone around corners. https://www.vox.com/... [image] Derek Thompson / @dkthomp : @pkafka @ibogost pretty wild that we're passing out of a generation of journalism where young writers were implicitly told that the first stone on the path to success in journalism was writing articles about what time shows are on TV and whether Star Wars Ep 4 comes before or after Star Wars Ep 3 Peter Kafka / @pkafka : @DKThomp @ibogost Sigh. https://www.vox.com/... [image] Peter Kafka / @pkafka : New from me: G/O Media caused an uproar when it used bots to write stories for Gizmodo and other sites this month. Now it's going to do it again. “It is absolutely a thing we want to do more of.” https://www.vox.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
G/O Media's first AI experiments on Gizmodo were error-ridden enough to draw public blowback, yet executives are committing to more bot-written stories across a portfolio that includes Jezebel — a doubling-down rather than a retreat. The move lands in a market already shifting: reporting earlier this spring found AI text generators quietly authoring more of the internet, shrinking the pool of clients who pay humans to write.
The ownership matters as much as the technology. Commentators framed the story as private equity buying the corpse of Gawker — once the most opinionated publisher of its day — and running it as an AI content mill, one anecdote capturing the whole arc of the last tech cycle. At the far end of that same pipeline sit operators like the one profiled running 2,000+ AI-generated news sites on dormant domains, showing where undifferentiated bot content tends to end up.
First-order effects
- Gizmodo and Jezebel readers get more machine-written stories from a publisher whose first attempts were publicly botched, putting the brands' editorial credibility on the line with every new AI post.
Second-order effects
- As G/O normalizes bot output, it competes directly with the low-cost AI content operations already flooding search — and with platform-level summarizers like Elon Musk's plan for Grok building news summaries solely from X posts — squeezing ad economics for human-written work across the industry.
Third-order effects
- If financially pressed publishers keep choosing volume over voice, the Gawker-to-content-mill path becomes a template for private-equity-owned media, while individuals are left managing synthetic reputations — as one reporter's effort to correct what AI chatbots say about him illustrates.
The trend: Under cost pressure, publishers are moving AI-generated content from experiment to default production even when early quality failures damage their brands.