Cutting Back On AI Slop

Others have already complained loudly and frequently about what they perceive to be a decline in quality on Vocal.

It isn’t unique to Vocal Media: just about every platform is suffering from bots, scammers and AI Slop right now. That a lot of platforms are actively encouraging or incentivising it doesn’t help.

But Vocal is a platform built on authentic material by genuine creatives, and it doesn’t have the massive user base that some other platforms do.

With that in mind, here are some suggestions of what Vocal can do to stop the AI creep.

Limit the number of stories posted per day, per creator.

The most I've published in a day was during one of the Haiku Challenges. I managed four poems in a 24-hour period. (Haiku are addictive!) On a day when I'm not at work and feel particularly inspired, I might manage two articles in a day.

A hard limit of, say, 3 articles per day, means that people have to actually put effort into what they post, instead of using AI to generate 20+ stories and stuffing them full of SEO keywords. If a new member of Vocal wants to add a bunch of stories they've already written, nothing is stopping them. They just have to spread it out over a couple of days instead of all at once, which is probably better for getting organic views anyway

Lots of people have been posting ideas for new challenges! Maybe take some of them up on it?

I went through the communities and thought of a Challenge for every one of them. I know multiple other creators have recently suggested Challenges on a theme, and there are plenty of Unofficial Challenges floating around Vocal.

Rather than posting a batch of challenges that feel like re-hashing the previous batch, go through the suggestions Vocal creators have made, particularly for some of the communities that haven't had much attention recently. It's don't think I've ever seen a challenge for Swamp, or Potent. Petlife might feel over-represented in the Unofficial Challenges, but it's overlooked in the Official ones.

I don't think Art or History has featured since the community was created and got a Challenge to announce it.

Perhaps Vocal should actually use some of the Challenge suggestions they keep asking for.

Stories created with AI are ineligible.

If AI was used, the article is ineligible to win a Challenge, or be selected as a Top Story or Leaderboard prize.

Honour and Honesty systems are all well and good, but they only work as long as people actually are open and honest about it, and unfortunately, we've gone past that point.

I do acknowledge that there will be problems with enforcing this one, and probably a lot of accusations without evidence, but since Challenges and Top Stories are Vocals big draw, perhaps those pushing AI slop will consider whether the traffic from reads will be enough on a site where profit is limited.

Taking a stand isn’t always easy, but it’s worth it.

Probationary Period for New Members

No one actually wants to go back to the days when getting a story approved could take up to a week, but perhaps it's time that new members did. Not permanently, but perhaps for the first month. Too many new members join Vocal, then flood the "new stories" page with AI slop and stories blatantly copied from the Top Story list.

So, for the first month, new Vocal creators have their stories reviewed by a human. If they’re found to have used AI, or copied from another story, the article is rejected and they have to resubmit.

Any creator who was on the site pre-2023 will tell you that it was frustrating, but it made people pay attention to what they were submitting.

Strike system for all creators

We all signed the terms and conditions when we signed up. While I understand that everyone makes mistakes, I think Vocal needs to get serious about banning not just Bad Faith accounts, but IP addresses of repeat offenders.

Everyone knows the insta-rage that comes from getting a notification that someone has commented, and discovering that it’s a scam, or a demand that you read their work, rather than a genuine comment on your work.

To Vocal’s credit, they are usually quick to catch and crack down on those obvious scams. Keep up the good work.

But once an account is removed, I don’t know that there is a system in place to stop the offenders from creating a new account and trying again.