Medium is taking a stand on AI-generated writing. An email from Medium arrived in my inbox a few days ago describing changes that are coming to the publishing platform.
Beginning May 1, 2024, stories with AI-generated writing (disclosed as such or not) are not allowed to be paywalled as part of Medium’s Partner Program.
Accounts that have fully AI-generated writing behind the paywall may have those stories removed from the paywall, and/or have their Partner Program enrollment revoked.
We define AI-generated writing as writing where the majority of the content has been created by an AI-writing program with little or no edits, improvements, fact-checking, or changes. This does not include AI writing tools such as AI outlining, or AI assisted fact, spelling, or grammar checkers.
For added perspective, Scott Lamb, VP, Content @ Medium, wrote (on Medium):
Readers tell us constantly that they want stories written by people about their experiences and insights. While we understand that AI technology can assist writing in many ways, stories that are generated entirely by AI don’t fit with Medium’s mission of being a place for high-quality human stories that deepen people’s understanding of the world.
I like Medium. They make publishing “a blog” a simple and compelling thing to do. Here’s my Medium blog. I also support their plan to remove AI-generated writing from the paid offerings on their site. We need more strong voices like Medium who vigorously call for original thinking and the writing that comes from it.
Lamb says “stories written by people about their experiences and insights” are what readers want. Is that what you want? I’d like to think so, and thanks to you and others like you who read Adpulp, I have plenty of reason to believe it is so.
A Story Written by A Person
When I first started showing my aspiring copywriter’s book in Portland in 1995, there was one word that creative directors shared with me, again and again, as if they’d secretly rehearsed their lines. Perseverance. That was the word. Not talent, passion, or craft. Perseverance.
I get it. Not only do you need to persevere through the first big test—making a book that will get you hired—a process that could last a few years. Once hired, the tests and their difficulty mount. There will be long nights, boring meetings, bad pizza, difficult bosses, and clueless clients. Perseverance.
The need for personal and professional perseverance is ever clear. Now, nearly 30 years on, let me ask about the industry’s need to persevere. Medium took a stand and I respect that. They don’t want their product diminished. Either do ad makers, so what active stands are ad agencies taking to make it clear that human creativity remains at the core of the business promise?
What stands are any of us taking? I see loads of ‘adapt or die’ preaching. By contrast, compelling calls to learn the basics of the business, and then perfect them, are not common. Nevertheless, the agency business has survived the birth of digital, I am certain it can also survive the Valley’s Hype Train and find a useful place for its sudden plethora of virtual assistants.
My confidence is based on the industry’s continued ability to attract creative people willing to trade their ideas and time for money. This is good. Creative people don’t follow instructions or official doctrine easily. We ask a lot of questions and allow our curious natures to guide us. This is good. We agree to play with the Valley’s newest toys and evaluate their merits, but many of us are grown-ups and we’re not about to be swallowed whole by them.
Willing or not, we do adapt, but not all tools are created equal. To adapt in a healthy way, we first need to see how the tool can help. Does the tool improve our strategic insights? Does it help us make brilliant creations from those insights? Because that’s what the humans on the team are doing, and if a machine is going to claim that it is intelligent, then it has to do more than sift data at warp speed. It also has to drift over into the dimly lit, very weird spaces where new ideas are hatched.
