Medium Accidentally Paved the Way for AI-Bot Content

The platform’s new set of rules could be incentivizing bot content

Photo by Eric Krull on Unsplash

Here’s a German proverb for you: “Das Gegenteil von gut ist gut gemeint.”

The sad irony of an unintentional mistake made with the best of intentions is actually hard to translate:“The opposite of good is well-intentioned.”

However, the essence is perfectly illustrated by Medium’s recent move to take a stand against AI-generated content.

Let there be bots!

Medium, in an attempt to preserve its platform as a “home for human writing”, recently announced two significant changes:

1. All AI-generated content must be labeled as such.
2. The 100-follower threshold for monetization has been removed (previously you had to get 100 followers before your Medium articles would generate income)

Now this could backfire quite a bit, as it literally encourages people to create a lot more fully-automated AI-content: The 100-follower hurdle used to stop people from producing seemingly human-created AI content simply because it took quite a while to reach that number with auto-generated content.