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How Beloved Indie Blog 'The Hairpin' Turned Into an AI Clickbait Farm
Beloved women’s website The Hairpin shut down in 2018. This month it returned from the dead to churn out AI clickbait. Its fate is a warning to all digital publications.
It served as a launching pad for bona fide stars like former New York Times reporter Jazmine Hughes, Bojack Horseman designer Lisa Hanawalt, and New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino precisely because it valued nurturing fresh ideas—and letting people make jokes!—not optimizing revenue per click. “The ease with which anyone can just spin up a site of a hundred or so AI-written blog posts based on the corpus of their choice must really be changing the game for the expired domain scavengers,” says John Mahoney, who memorably wrote about the dynamics of spammy digital media businesses for The Awl. “It's a shame a site as notable as The Hairpin is being used to regurgitate AI-generated sludge (especially on the band White Town), but with experts predicting the web to be 90 percent full of generated noise, this is unfortunately to be expected and something we'll see much more of throughout the year,” says Ben Colman, CEO of the deepfake detection startup Reality Defender.
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