How Beloved Indie Blog 'The Hairpin' Turned Into an AI Clickbait Farm

It served as a launching pad for bona fide stars like former New York Times reporter Jazmine Hughes, Bojack Horseman designer Lisa Hanawalt, and New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino precisely because it valued nurturing fresh ideasand letting people make jokes!not.

The ease with which anyone can just spin up a site of a hundred or so AI-written blog posts based on the corpus of their choice must really be changing the game for the expired domain scavengers, says John Mahoney, who memorably wrote about the dynamics of spammy digital media businesses for The Awl..

People working within the AI world agree that this type of click farm is probably on the rise.. It's a shame a site as notable as The Hairpin is being used to regurgitate AI-generated sludge (especially on the band White Town), but with experts predicting the web to be 90 percent full of generated noise, this is unfortunately to be expected and something we'll see much more of throughout the year, says Ben Colman, CEO of the deepfake detection startup Reality Defender...

In related media-upheaval news, popular music outlet Pitchfork is getting folded into GQ. (Both of them, like WIRED, are owned by Cond Nast.) That makes it a good time to take a few minutes to revisit WIREDs 2006 profile of Pitchfork, written when it was an independent, Chicago-based online music fanzine with a small but fervent fanbase..

Many of the eulogies for Pitchfork have focused on the deleterious effect algorithm-driven streaming culture has had on music media, with some arguing that the rise of Spotifys custom playlists lessened the cultural impact of criticism and reviews...

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