Today's Latest Stories - Or How Vocal is Losing the AI War

Does anyone else have a problem with the picture above?

I do.

(I also have some solutions... I'll get to those later.)

Since Vocal introduced the ability to flag AI-generated content a couple of months ago, I thought I'd do a random check to see how many authors are actually flagging their AI-generated work – and how many are not.

The picture above speaks for itself. None of the articles I've highlighted as AI content are flagged as such. I used the tool at https://www.scribbr.co.uk/ai-detector/ to check each article.

Clearly Vocal is not doing any proactive AI detection themselves. In fact, since 'AI content' has been added to the 'Report' function, it seems like Vocal is pushing the problem of policing AI content down the line to its users.

(Vocal also doesn't even do a cursory web search to check for plagiarised content. This isn't an AI problem. This is as old as the internet.)

So what does our $10 for Vocal+ pay for?

I suppose the cost of servers and bandwidth must be rocketing when the website is exploding with a tsunami of AI-generated, plagiarised, spam and barely-concealed commercial content.

But I would rather it was spent on achieving Vocal's primary goals, as described in its mission statement:

Vocal is a platform for supporting, discovering and rewarding creators...

... [where] all types of creatives can get discovered and fund their creativity.

I want Vocal to spend money on supporting human creators, spreading ideas that come from human brains, and helping those humans connect with other humans who respond emotionally and authentically.

I believe that this tidal wave of AI generated content is fundamentally undermining both goals. It drowns out human creators. It fills comments threads with generic and irrelevant fluff. It wastes the time and attention of valuable human readers.

I have some suggestions that Vocal could adopt:

None of these suggestions will solve the problem, but they're at least the beginning of a solution.

I'd love to know how Vocal is planning to combat the AI issue. The most recent update clearly made no difference. If this is the best that Vocal can come up with, perhaps that's an even bigger problem than the AI.

Thanks for reading!