John Herrman: Every news organization is desperate for the next thing. Anything that might provide future revenue streams, that's a serious danger and I think it's returning with AI.

Brooke Gladstone: News outlets strike deals with AI companies hoping they'll work better than the disastrous collaborations of the past. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. If you can’t beat them, join them. How one news outlet is partnering with a startup in an effort to make AI less racist.

Elinor Tatum: Garbage in, garbage out. If there are things that misrepresent our communities and what it's learning from, then what it's going to spit out is going to be misrepresentations.

Brooke Gladstone: How to earn big bucks by reanimating defunct domain names and filling them with AI sludge.

Kate Knibbs: There's a lot of posts about dream interpretation. It's just clearly written by an AI. The worst thing you've ever read in your life.

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this.

Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. This week's show is all about the use of generative artificial intelligence in journalism.

Brooke Gladstone: People both pro and con grapple with whether to resist apps like ChatGPT or embrace them. We begin with an anecdote, the story of a late great blog called The Hairpin that underwent an unsettling transformation.

Kate Knibbs: When you went to The Hairpin, you were getting something you couldn't get anywhere else.

Micah Loewinger: Kate Knibbs is a senior tech writer for WIRED.

Kate Knibbs: It was part of the all-network, the collection of blogs that had a very writer-friendly sensibility. Jia Tolentino was an editor, Jazmine Hughes was an editor, Anne Helen Petersen-- it just had a murderer's row of really talented, distinctive voices. It never had a mass audience but the people who read it loved it. I've heard it compared to The Velvet Underground.

Micah Loewinger: Not that many people bought their album but every one of them started their own band kind of thing.

Kate Knibbs: Yes. Not that many people might have read it but everyone who did became a blogger. [laughs]

Micah Loewinger: I love that.

Kate Knibbs: This website was so special to me and so many other people.

Micah Loewinger: What happened to it?

Kate Knibbs: It just didn't succeed as a business and they decided to fold it.

Micah Loewinger: The story of digital media.

Kate Knibbs: Yes, the sad story.

Micah Loewinger: A couple of weeks ago, Kate heard through the grapevine that the site was mysteriously back online.

Kate Knibbs: Someone from The Hairpin world alerted me to the fact that it had been revived in this wholly bizarre way. It was just like generic content mill nonsense. There's a lot of posts that are about dream interpretation. It's just clearly written by an AI. The worst thing you've ever read in your life.

Micah Loewinger: Typically, I feel like these people who run these content mills aren't that eager to talk to the press or just want to go about their business without too much scrutiny. How did you figure out who now owns The Hairpin?

Kate Knibbs: I could tell you a lie about doing some sophisticated forensic digging and make myself sound really good but I'll just tell you the truth which is I emailed the email on the website and the owner wrote me back and just was very eager to talk about his project.

Nebojša Vujinović: You asked me about Hairpin. What? [laughs]

Micah Loewinger: This is the man who responded to her email, a Serbian entrepreneur named Nebojša Vujinović.

Nebojša Vujinović: You can call me Vujo because I'm Vujinović my second name so Vujo is okay.

Micah Loewinger: Kate Knibbs connected me with Vujo after she profiled him for WIRED this past week, an article titled Confessions of an AI Clickbait Kingpin.

Kate Knibbs: He actually told me that he was very surprised that I was asking about The Hairpin because it wasn't one of his top websites.

Nebojša Vujinović: The Hairpin is not top 20 maybe in my top 100 websites.

Kate Knibbs: He said he had over 2,000, although he did not provide me with a master list. Take that with a grain of salt but I checked that he owned at least a few dozen.

Nebojša Vujinović: I have much bigger websites than this one. It's nothing special for me.

Micah Loewinger: What are some other websites that you own that you're proud of?

Nebojša Vujinović: I'm not especially proud of anything I must tell you because--

Micah Loewinger: [laughs] Why not? This is your life's work. Why are you not proud?

Nebojša Vujinović: No, it's not. I can be proud on my kid. I can be proud of my songs that I write.

Kate Knibbs: He's also a pretty actually popular DJ in Serbia.

[MUSIC - Jelena Vučković & DJ Vujo: Misu moj]

Nebojša Vujinović: I'm singing that part of the song. That song was the most popular song in Serbia for more than two years. Also, it was a hit in Bosnia and Herzegovina, it was hit in Croatia.

Micah Loewinger: You're a celebrity in Serbia.

Nebojša Vujinović: Small celebrity.

Micah Loewinger: This is actually how Vujo got into the content mill game. In 2005 when he was still trying to make a name for himself as a DJ, he noticed that his personal site where he posted his music was getting more and more traffic.

Nebojša Vujinović: I get the idea, okay, I will write about, I don't know, house music and my purchasing housemusic.com, for example.

Micah Loewinger: He quickly learned that starting a new site from scratch, churning out blog posts that advertisers like is a ton of work, and getting people to stumble upon your site is hard too. If you Google house music, you'll probably see bigger older music sites first.

Nebojša Vujinović: One day I started to buy already established websites. Just imagine you buying websites of, I don't know, closed restaurant, and that restaurant have backlinks from New Yorker, from BBC, from, I don't know, Yellow Pages, from Forbes.

Micah Loewinger: If the restaurant was written about and linked on sites that Google considers to be high quality, then it's more likely to show up on the first page of Google results.

Nebojša Vujinović: Well, of course, it's not so simple but there is a bigger chance for websites like that to rank easier than another domain without backlinks.

Micah Loewinger: This became a big part of his business and it appears to be legal. Every day he says he hangs out on auction sites like GoDaddy looking for dead sites that he can scoop up.

Nebojša Vujinović: I'm buying established websites 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 per day, every day.

Micah Loewinger: Which is how he ended up with an eclectic assortment of sites including photolog.com and early Spanish language competitor of Facebook and pope2you.net, a former official site of Pope Benedict the 16th, and of course The Hairpin.

Kate Knibbs: The most popular site in his table is another women's media site. Actually, it's called The Frisky. It was launched in the 2010s as well and at one point it was one of the most popular women's interest websites in the US. It was like a Cosmo style. There was a lot of sex content and dating advice and it went out of business in 2016. The domain was up for grabs at some point and he grabbed it.

Nebojša Vujinović: It was so popular. I think more than 10 people work every day on that website. Yes, real humans, we write about everything, especially about celebrities. Meghan Markle, she was pregnant and that was a huge story. Today, maybe The Frisky earning $100,000 per year. I don't know.

Micah Loewinger: We were not able to verify his earnings from The Frisky.

Kate Knibbs: He's making a lot of money off sex toy companies that still want to do sponsored posts or advertisements. I was looking at The Frisky search traffic and all of the top keywords are breast related. When people are searching for things on the internet related to bra sizes, it tend to send you to The Frisky. I think that helps keep the engine running.

Micah Loewinger: In the past year or so, Vujo's engine got a big new upgrade, generative AI.

Kate Knibbs: It just supercharged this weird spammy corner of the SEO industry. Instead of taking four hours to write 12 blog posts, all of a sudden, you can do that in 40 seconds. They primarily use ChatGPT. They just put in prompts and spit out articles and he does say that they fact-check them. I don't know how thorough the fact check is but there's some quality control going on to avoid putting something super offensive on the internet that would end up alienating potential advertisers.

Nebojša Vujinović: We don't publish anything about politics. We write about health. We write about fitness.

Kate Knibbs: It's not something that's super sustainable. He's already losing traffic on a lot of the big properties, including The Frisky because people figure out that it's AI-generated.

Micah Loewinger: The Frisky, the Pope website, it's a little silly but there is a slightly darker side to this which is that he is using the same business model on dead news websites.

Kate Knibbs: Yes. Honestly, the most shocking thing that he owned to me was the English language website for Apple Daily which is a very culturally significant pro-democracy newspaper that was based out of Hong Kong that was shut down in quite a dramatic fashion a few years ago.

Male Speaker 1: The newspaper has had financial trouble since its assets were frozen after the arrest of, of course, its founder Jimmy Lai, the billionaire media tycoon.

Kate Knibbs: He was a very, very outspoken critic of the Chinese government.

News clip: He's a frequent visitor to Washington and has been labeled by Beijing as a traitor

Kate Knibbs: Jimmy Lai is currently under arrest, as are several of his top editors.

News clip: Charged with "conspiracy to collude with foreign forces". His crime was running a media outlet that wouldn't tow the party line.

Kate Knibbs: Apple Daily was very important to the pro-democracy movement.

Micah Loewinger: I'm looking at it now. It's just appledaily.com, right?

Kate Knibbs: Yes, appledaily.com.

Micah Loewinger: Funny Cool Username Ideas - A Guide to Creating Memorable Online Handles. Then we got, Unlocking LeBron's Recovery Secrets. Under the heading, World, like this is like world news. Eight Tips to Take Your Healing Seriously. Then under actors, the actors heading, we see 45+ Happy Birthday Wishes for Teacher.

[laughter]

Kate Knibbs: They're not even trying to hide the fact that it's AI-generated, right? This is an important media outlet. It's really unsettling to see a news outlet emptied out and replaced by the complete opposite of what it stood for.

Micah Loewinger: Can I ask you about Apple Daily?

Nebojša Vujinović: Yes.

Micah Loewinger: Because I do think some of our listeners would be really disappointed to learn that this important website was shut down and is now posting AI content.

Nebojša Vujinović: I understand, but there is a lot-- I live in Serbia. I live in ex-Yugoslavia. There is a lot of things here that--

Micah Loewinger: Vujo's English isn't super clear here, but he went on to talk about growing up in Bosnia during the war, which he says destroyed his childhood. He referenced a hospital near his home that NATO bombed in the '90s, injustices that feel bigger to him than putting AI clickbait on a dead news website that the Chinese government shut down in Hong Kong.

Nebojša Vujinović: I'm not part of that story. There is a lot of bad things in this world. A lot of things is not right. If I buy some domain legal and create anything what I want, is it bad thing? Does it change anything if I put on that website, "peace in the world," is it change anything in the world? No, it's not. I think you understand what I want to tell you.

Micah Loewinger: I do understand. I don't think that you're responsible for the website going away, but AI is helping accelerate the death of journalism. Do you think about that at all?

Nebojša Vujinović: I'm afraid AI can be used for bad things. I'm not a fan. What is the opposite of fun? Hate. A hater?

Micah Loewinger: You hate AI?

Nebojša Vujinović: Maybe I hate, I especially if I can see people losing jobs because of AI. You're a journalist, you're afraid about your business because this striking journalism for sure, striking all writers, all content creators. I writing songs today, so yes, also I'm afraid it will make better music and play better music than me as a DJ. Yes, I understand, but--

Micah Loewinger: But of course, he talked about how useful and popular ChatGPT is. He cited a projection that I've seen quoted widely in the press that by 2025, 90% of online content could be generated by AI. Vujo, you are helping create an internet where there is less and less human on the internet? Is that an internet that you want to be on?

Nebojša Vujinović: No. Yes, I agree with you, but I hate also using cars with oil or petrol and destroying our planet.

Kate Knibbs: He said, "I like horses. I drive a car because we live in a society where you have to drive a car."

Nebojša Vujinović: Probably you don't also like destroying our planet, and you are still using car too.

Kate Knibbs: That's how he feels about AI like, this is the way things are going, so I'm going to go in the direction that the world is already moving.

Micah Loewinger: Can't beat them, join them. That's what I'm hearing you say.

Nebojša Vujinović: Something like that. That is good one. That's it.

Kate Knibbs: He's not sitting there being like, "I'm going to destroy a beloved independent women's media blog. I'm going to create this perverse desecration of this important pro-democracy Hong Kong news outlet." He is simply taking advantage of an opportunity that has been presented on the internet that has a very low barrier of entry, and that's it. He just wants to make money, and I think that's how a lot of the people who are making the internet worse operate.

Micah Loewinger: Kate, thank you very much.

Kate Knibbs: Thank you so much for having me.

Micah Loewinger: Kate Knibbs is a senior writer for WIRED. Her latest piece is titled Confessions of an AI Clickbait Kingpin.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, Vujo says, "If you can't beat them, join them," while the New York Times has other ideas.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media.

[MUSIC - Jelena Vučković & DJ Vujo: Misu moj]

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