Gizmodo owner G/O Media’s first foray into AI-generated content was messy, avoidable, and insulting to readers and employees alike. And yet, the AI-generated article in question ultimately did what it was seemingly designed to do: rank in search results. In the aftermath of the mess it took to get here, that finding should concern everyone in the media industry. It’s an early glimpse of a dystopian future in which AI models generate content for the sake of other bots, at the expense of any humans caught up in the fallout. To back up a bit: at the end of June, G/O Media — which owns Gizmodo, Kotaku, The Onion, and Quartz, among others — announced that it would begin to publish AI-generated content across their many publications as part of a “modest test.” “It shouldn’t be a surprise that we’ve done a significant amount of thinking about Artificial Intelligence, just as everyone in the media business has been doing of late,” Merrill Brown, the media group’s CEO, wrote in an email to employees. “We’re convinced here that the changes AI will bring to the media and journalism worlds will be very meaningful, if difficult to predict with certainty, in 2023.” Unsurprisingly, employees across G/O Media-owned publications were furious in response to the news. And as it turned out, with good reason. In the very first AI-generated article Gizmodo published last week, the website’s “Gizmodo Bot” completely missed the mark. The post, a so-called “Chronological List of Star Wars Movies & TV…Gizmodo's AI-Generated Star Wars Article Still Has Errors, and Now It's Ranking on Google