Ran into this the other day researching a brewery. Google AI summary referenced a glowing NYT profile of its beers. The linked article was not in fact about that brewery, but an entirely different one. Brewery I was researching has never been mentioned in the NYT. Complete invention at that point and has 'stolen' the good press from a different place and just fed the user what they wanted to see, namely a recommendation for the thing I was googling.
This has become such a talking point of mine when I'm inevitably forced to explain why LLMs can't come for my job (yet). People seem baffled by the idea that reporting collects novel information about the world which hasn't been indexed/ingested at any point because it didn't exist before I did the interview or whatever it is.
So is the argument here that the New Yorker can make more money from AI slop writing overseen by low-wage overseas workers? Isn't that obviously not the case?
Anyway I think I've misunderstood the context in which we're using the word 'competition' here. My response was about attitudes toward AI from writers at the tip-top of the industry rather than profit maxxing/high-volume content farm type places.
>If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. You're out.
A very HN-centric view of the world. From my perch in journalism and publishing, elite writers absolutely loathe AI and almost uniformly agree it sucks. So to my mind the most 'competitive' spheres in writing do not use AI at all.