🤬 WTF?

It’s been a while since we talked about the Mediavine purge of sites on Journey for suspected AI usage.

I didn’t plan on talking about it today.

Then a reader sent me something that made me scrap what I was preparing for today.

Did Anyone Ask For This?

We all know that AI content detection tools are bad at their job.

Sure, they can find un-edited AI content. But they are also really good at marking things that aren’t AI as AI.

Every so often I pull up the free online AI content checker at Originality.ai to see if it’s improved any.

I just type directly into the box until I hit the minimum word count to run a check.

I shit you not, most of time it tells me I am some level of AI…usually 100%. Until I do this and it knows that I’m not a robot, I have zero faith in any of these tools.

Cue relevancy to this mini-rant…

I’m assuming Mediavine didn’t ask Jon to do this since it doesn’t explicitly say that.

And if I know how many times the tool has false positives, then he does, too. Yet, he’s actively encouraging people to use the tool as a means to go after other people’s livelihood.

It doesn’t matter how you feel about AI content or what Mediavine is doing. This is not a cool thing to do.

My favorite part of this is the line “As a platform that believes all online content should be published with integrity and transparency, we’d like to help.”

Such a hypocrite.

Cause if you’ve been in this industry long enough, then you know that Jon used to publish under a fake name. For YEARS.

But make no mistake, this is clearly an attempt to sell subscriptions to a shitty AI content detection tool.

And it’s disgusting.

Coming up…

More on what I’m working on and how it’s going.

Stay awesome,

Shawna

P.S. If you’re looking for high level discussions or tips on things like local SEO and Rank & Rent, I highly recommend Jacky Chou’s Advise community. I’ve been in it for several months and there’s tons of value in it, including a SOP for local SEO.

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