AI Slop Is Flooding Medium
The blogging platform Medium is facing an influx of AI-generated content. CEO Tony Stubblebine says it “doesn’t matter” as long as nobody reads it
AI slop is flowing onto every major platform where people post online—and Medium is no exception.
The 12-year-old publishing platform has undertaken a dizzying number of pivots over the years. It’s finally on a financial upswing, having turned a monthly profit for the first time this summer. Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine and other executives at the company have described the platform as “a home for human writing.” But there is evidence that robot bloggers are increasingly flocking to the platform, too.
Earlier this year, WIRED asked AI detection startup Pangram Labs to analyze Medium. It took a sampling of 274,466 recent posts over a six-week period and estimated that over 47 percent were likely AI-generated. “This is a couple orders of magnitude more than what I see on the rest of the internet,” says Pangram CEO Max Spero. (The company’s analysis of one day of global news sites this summer found 7 percent as likely AI-generated.)
The strain of slop on Medium tends toward the banal, especially compared with the dadaist flotsam clogging Facebook. Instead of Shrimp Jesus, one is more apt to see vacant dispatches about cryptocurrency. The tags with the most likely AI-generated content included “NFT”—out of 5,712 articles tagged with this phrase over the last several months, Pangram found that 4,492, or around 78 percent, came back as likely AI-generated—as well as “web3,” “ethereum,” “AI,” and, for whatever reason, “pets.”
WIRED asked a second AI detection startup, Originality AI, to run its own analysis. It examined a sampling of Medium posts from 2018 and compared it with a sampling from this year. In 2018, 3.4 percent were estimated as likely AI-generated. CEO Jon Gillham says that percentage corresponds to the company’s false-positive rate, as AI tools were not widely used at that point. For 2024, with a sampling of 473 articles published this year, it suspected that just over 40 percent were likely AI-generated. With no knowledge of each others’ analyses, both Originality and Pangram came to similar conclusions about the scope of AI content.
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