MotorTrend Is Touting AI While ‘Slop’ From Other Sites Is Killing Car Journalism

A high-up employee at one of The Autopian’s competitors recently told me about something bothering them: Their site publishes so many crap articles every month that they now have to spend significant portions of their days replying to car company PR reps complaining about all the misinformation being “written” by outside contributors paid pennies to churn out slop. This is the poisoned well of the internet that we’re all being forced to drink from, and it’s killing us all. Let’s talk about this, and also about a recent MotorTrend article admitting to the use of AI.

As the publisher of this site, I have to contend with the fact that, for all the work we do to be model citizens of the web (we don’t review products we don’t use, we try to pay a living wage, we don’t overwhelm the site with ads, we don’t use AI to write stories), we’re up against sites that pump slop into the ecosystem and surround that slop with as many ads as they can.

While not all of this slop is written by AI, my suspicion is that the writers of this crap often use artificial intelligence to create their articles. There was a recent Reddit thread accusing Jalopnik of using AI, and I replied in the piece that there’s no way the actual journalists there are behind this trend (we know many of the journalists; we think they’re great).

What seems to be happening in various parts of the industry is that individuals outside the normal editorial channels are being given the right to publish by the revenue side of the business, and these low-paid writers (often from abroad) are using AI to complete their articles.

One recent example from Jalopnik is “Here’s What Costco Customers Really Think About Its Wheels,” an article written by UmmeAimon Shabbir, a Pakistani writer whose LinkedIn profile describes her job as “creating engaging content for Google’s Spotlight.”

It’s a strange article that doesn’t seem to demonstrate any real awareness of how buying tires from Costco really works. The top comment asks: “Anybody remember when Jalopnik articles weren’t AI-generated slop?” Another example, from the same writer, describes how Colin Chapman created a car “with two chassis stacked together.” There’s no sourcing for any of the article, so it’s possible it’s based on this article by Huibert Mees, the suspension designer who actually looked at the cars in person in order to write about them.

The apparent slop isn’t isolated to Jalopnik. It seems similar bylines are appearing at places like Motor1, which features Google-baiting articles like this one “‘They Lying! That’s a Tactic:’ Woman Pays Car Note for Brand-New Kia Twice a Month. Then She Gets a Letter 5 Years Later” that are being called “ownership stories.” Autoblog seems to have some of this, plus a lot of commerce pieces built around trying to sell you tools they don’t seem to have personally tested.

While the degree to which AI is being used is hard to say, it all falls under the banner of “slop.” These are articles either being written by a computer or very specifically for a computer (in this case, the one that decides which stories you see or don’t see), or both. It’s not about journalism or quality; it’s about cheaply producing enough content to make money. It’s a sign of how challenging this industry has become.

The only thing I can say positively about the sites doing this work is that they’re smart enough to try to hide it. These aren’t efforts championed by journalists; at best, these are desperate attempts at revenue designed to keep journalists employed.

Ed Loh, the Editor-in-Chief of MotorTrend, seems to be taking a different approach. He’s openly admitting to using AI in a recent post about his EV-focused podcast with Jonny Lieberman.

The podcast went on hiatus for a while but is back, and one of the big changes, he notes, is that the company is now a part of Hearst Magazines, which also publishes Car And Driver and Road & Track, as well as owns BringATrailer.

The other change?

Another big change is that we’re openly embracing artificial intelligence (AI). The InEVitable is, after all, a vodcast about the future of mobility, and as you no doubt have heard, ad nauseum, THE FUTURE IS AI. So, we decided to put that to the test in the most meta way possible, by actively using commonly available AI tools in the production of The InEVitable. Jonny and I remain your 100 percent human (I think) hosts, interviewing mostly human guests, so be not afraid. The main point of the podcast (the guests, our conversation and insights) are still human, it’s the supporting elements that will be AI-assisted.

For instance, parts of this article were written with the assistance of Hearst Magazine’s ChatGPT. We created the social media clip via an agentic AI video editor called OpusClip. The summary of this article used by Apple News was created via an AI tool in our content management system. We plan on using additional AI tools to assist with future episode descriptions, thumbnail image creation, and audio clean up. Why? For all the reasons AI tools are being touted—speed, efficiency, and experimentation.

What Loh doesn’t mention here is that his company’s new owner, Hearst Magazines, is part of a company that just sold the rights to its works to OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT.

Here’s a Hearst press release on the topic:

“Our partnership with OpenAI will help us evolve the future of magazine content,” said Hearst Magazines President Debi Chirichella. “This collaboration ensures that our high-quality writing and expertise, cultural and historical context and attribution and credibility are promoted as OpenAI’s products evolve.”

In exchange for money, Hearst seems to be agreeing to hand over all of its content to OpenAI (the creator of ChatGPT). This is the “suing for peace” version of dealing with AI, and I’m sympathetic to it. Maybe that’s what we’ll have no choice but to do, because some of these companies are  training their models on our content already, and we’re not getting anything out of it.

The amounts Hearst got weren’t disclosed, but it’s assumed by Axios that Hearst is being “compensated millions” for partnering with OpenAI. This is all to say that this is the first time I’m seeing this from a Hearst Autos site, but I doubt it’ll be the last.

This seems bad. I’m not anti-AI, and in fact use AI tools in my own life (Perplexity and Gemini, in particular). When AI is used to take some of the toil out of creating art, that doesn’t bother me, but Loh conflating the creation of graphics and the writing of content with “audio clean up” seems disingenuous to me.

In fact, if you get to the bottom of the post, you’ll see it’s not just the above:

Editor’s Note: This article was written with the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI). Future articles in this series will also be AI-assisted.

Loh doesn’t outright say the article was written by AI, just that it was “assisted,” so we don’t know the degree to which robots are writing what you and I are reading. Perhaps we should applaud the transparency here: at least Loh is admitting to using it (though without the context of the OpenAI partnership). However, if we take what Loh is saying at face value, it does seem like he’s at the very least not using AI begrudgingly.

This makes sense given that in a previous piece on Motor Trend, he said:

 “They don’t care who generated the illustration…They love it or they hate it. AI doesn’t come up. I think eventually, writing is going to get that way. [Readers] just want a cool story told, they don’t really care how.”

There’s more to the story, and to his credit, Loh mentions ethical concerns and says he does think humans will remain important, but that quote above bugs me because I don’t feel that way about what we write here at all. You readers really, really do care about who is writing the words you’re reading, and if you found out that it was a robot, you’d rightly feel betrayed.

I think I need to be clear about this: That will never happen here, and if you don’t think this is ok industry-wide, if you think it’s important that sites like this one exist, then you should become a member. Right now.

It used to be my belief that it doesn’t matter if all these sites create slop or use AI, because it’ll eventually differentiate our real work. I’m more bothered by this now because it’s immediately impacting how we make money.

All this slop is being created at an exponential rate and swarming the usual networks where our content is shared. These sites are also the ones most likely to be overwhelmed with ads. This means that not only is it harder for our content to be seen, but when it is seen that the value of the ads we show is lower because there’s a glut of inventory.

I went to a conference for publishers this week in Georgia, and there’s going to be more crap like this, not less, in the future. It’s InEVitable…

If we are going to survive the storm, we need more help. Please consider becoming a member if you haven’t, if only to show that there are still people who think good journalism is worth paying for.

Hat tip to Alberto for pointing this out!