Column Earlier this year I got fired and replaced by a robot. And the managers who made the decision didn't tell me – or anyone else affected by the change – that it was happening.
The gig I lost started as a happy and profitable relationship with Cosmos Magazine – Australia's rough analog of New Scientist. I wrote occasional features and a column that appeared every three weeks in the online edition.
Everyone seemed happy with the arrangement: my editors, the readers, and myself. We'd found a groove that I believed would continue for years to come.
It didn't. In February – just days after I'd submitted a column – I and all other freelancers for Cosmos received an email informing us that no more submissions would be accepted.
It's a rare business that can profitably serve both science and the public, and Cosmos was no exception: I understand it was kept afloat with financial assistance. When that funding ended, Cosmos ran into trouble.
Accepting the economic realities of our time, I mourned the loss of a great outlet for my more scientific investigations, and moved on.
It turns out that wasn't quite the entire story, though. Six months later, on August 8, a friend texted with news from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. In summary (courtesy of the ABC):
Cosmos had been caught out using generative AI to compose articles for its website – and using a grant from a nonprofit that runs Australia's most prestigious journalism awards to do it. That's why my work – writing articles for that website – had so suddenly vanished.
But that's not even the half of it. The AI most likely had been "fed" my articles – via the "Common Crawl," the gigantic tarball of nearly everything that's ever been published to the web – in order to ensure the correctness of that content.
I hadn't just been fired and replaced by a robot. That robot was programmed to become a surrogate me.
The article goes on to report that Cosmos's editors-in-chief had no knowledge of this. It was all done quietly – which speaks volumes for how this proposal would have been received, had it been shared with the staff responsible for working with freelancers. Cosmos's mea culpa regarding the incident laments the lack of communication before the work that resulted in AI-penned articles appearing.
What an understatement.
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Editors know that audiences want to read words (like these) written by a person. While suitable for a summary, the bland, "mid" content generated by an AI lacks a human touch. It'll do in a pinch, but leaves no one particularly satisfied.
Cosmos decided to lean into generating the slop filling all of the web's marketing channels, as generative AI serves up more of what marketers want us to see – but little of what people want to read.
Cosmos was brave enough to label AI-generated articles – more transparency than we will see from other publications, working in the shadows as they become one-person shows, with a single individual managing the output of a massive content farm.
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Techniques exist to watermark such AI generated content – readers easily could be alerted. But that idea has already been nixed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who recently declared that AI watermarking threatened at least 30 percent of the ChatGPT-maker's business. Organizations don't want to own up that they're generating and spamming us with slop.
In the absence of that sort of detection, we need something more like a chain of provenance, showing the path of these words, from my keyboard to your eyes – laying bare the process of writing, editing and publishing. With that sort of transparency we will be able to see the human element shining through.
That human touch has never had a rival. Now that it does, it has instantly become the most valuable thing for a reader to experience. That should be reason enough to make it happen. ®