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Intro
Publishers are fighting back in a battle of humans against bots...
They have been complaining extensively about how AI platforms and Google’s own AI features are using their content and, ultimately, taking their traffic.
There is also a clear divide among publishers on whether they should allow AI bots to access their content at all. Some are blocking them, while others are allowing access, and so far, there is no clear strategy or agreed-upon path for how publishers should tackle this.
And if you haven’t heard, just last week, more than 300 French newspapers filed a complaint against Google over AI Overviews, less than a month after the feature was rolled out in France.
Seems like publishers are hoping for governments to protect the industry. But things are not that simple, are they?
The challenge isn’t just about LLMs stealing content and serving it to users. Journalists and reporters are also competing against AI-powered newsrooms, some of which are completely human-free and fully operated by AI.
An AI news publication called RuntimeWire beat WIRED and other popular news publications by posting stories THREE HOURS faster! And in the world of news, time is of the essence… so you can imagine how big a deal that is.
That should be a fun and interesting one to look into, so buckle up!
The Tea
At the recent Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, OpenAI shared new details about a hacking incident involving its own rogue AI agents. They have been talking about those incidents very proudly, by the way 😄
Anyways, as usual, after the event, reporters raced to publish, and WIRED was among the fastest. But an outlet called RuntimeWire beat it by more than three hours.
THREE WHOLE HOURS.
RuntimeWire had no reporter at the event. Actually, they have no reporter at all. It’s an AI newsroom, where AI bots scout the internet to find stories they can write about.
In around 3 months, RuntimeWire posted more than 2,000 stories by scanning court databases, forums, company filings, and social media for tech news. This AI newsroom costs $100/day to run.
On the day of the Black Hat security conference, Ryan Merket, the founder of RuntimeWire, spotted an OpenAI executive posting about the talk on X. Merket fed a transcript of the livestream to his AI agents while the session was still underway, and RuntimeWire published about six minutes later.
Voila! Or is it? Is this the death of real journalism? Should we be worried?
The Truth
It’s easy to see news like this and say, “Oh great, one more job category AI is going to take over”…. but that’s far from the truth.
While this is a successful experiment to some extent, let’s not forget the facts:
The quality is not comparable to real journalism.
There will be incidents where real journalism that is present live covering an event cannot be simply replaced by an AI reporter.
Then there’s also the data… as a curious SEO, I decided to have a look at how RuntimeWire performs in search. It all comes down to two questions:
1# Will people like AI reporting?
The data says there’s just momentary interest in the brand, probably related to news about the brand rather than stories reported by the brand itself!
2# Will bots like this content?
Will fellow bots like the content generated by one of their own? 😄 The irony…
We know that Google isn’t against AI-generated content per se. However, we also know that this content is low effort to generate with minimal human intervention and real-world experiences (bots cannot live life 😄)… it’s the definition of commodity content… you know, the type of content that is just canned and mass-produced, that looks good at face value, but offers no actual value over any other page on the internet.
A simple search for the brand name shows that there aren’t even sitelinks for this website. If anything, it goes to show that none of the pages come off to Google as important or popular to users.
Compare that to WIRED in search? There’s a Knowledge Panel, there are sitelinks, there’s “Latest from WIRED,” and more…
If you also look at the traffic, the website received around 100k visitors in the last month, despite having over 2,000 articles. That’s 50 visitors/article. Also, it does not seem to be successful in search. Most of its traffic is from organic social (Reddit and Facebook). All data is from Similarweb.
The top referring website is news.ycombinator.com, which is a platform where you can submit your own stories, really, so no magical tricks here or anything that cannot be replicated or, even better, outperformed…
My 2 cents is, the website idea is cool, and is good enough for people looking for a very high-level surface read into the news. It’s a battle of brand and distribution, not quality at all.
While these kinds of websites can see some success, I don’t see them winning big. They’re definitely an annoyance to big news publishers, but nothing that cannot be addressed.
And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)
I think the biggest lesson here is to always pause and think, and understand the play you’re up against.
Creating awesome content is great, but relying just on that is like saying, “Create great products and people will come.”
In news, I don’t see AI reporters outperforming real, experienced reporters or publishers that have been in the game for a long time. Yeah, sure, AI reporting can be faster, so they have a few tricks up their sleeves. However, that is something all publishers can learn from and use.
Any traffic AI newsrooms are capturing today is because of gaps big publishers have left. Are you fast enough? Are you distributing on the same platforms? Are you branded right for your audience?
Nope. AI is still far from replacing humans in journalism.
That’s that for today folks and see you in the next newsletter!
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Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.
Looking forward to the follow up post where you actually use first-party data: https://runtimewire.com/in-public