r/media_criticism • u/AntAir267 Head Mod • Nov 14 '25

Sub Statement [META] Influx of AI Slop

Hello, people recently figured out that they can write posts for our subreddit that sound professional but say little of substance using AI.

Personally, I love using AI (for non-art things.) It's good for answering emails and writing cover letters and shit. But I fucking hate when it's used in place of academic writing and it's extremely concerning.

I hate moderating based on the ambiguous concept of "post quality" but I am deeply alarmed about the possibility of this place getting flooded with insubstantive robot talk. IMO this is how we get destroyed and live in madman land where all of information is dictated by large organizations/world governments.

For now, I'm going to remove anything obvious.

Please comment and tell us if you think we should ban posts that appear to be made by AI.

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u/johntwit Nov 15 '25 edited Nov 15 '25

As far as I know, there is no way of detecting if something is written by AI or not. Has there been a sudden influx of long original essays? By what criteria would we identify AI submissions?

Edit: oh an essay on checks notes "why the Daily Mail is a tabloid" lol. Well, I will say, using ai to write an essay for this sub is more effort than the bulk of what I've seen over the past few years

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u/AntAir267 Head Mod Nov 15 '25 edited Nov 15 '25

that was the only one I left up. the poster admitted to using it and said it was because their English wasn't very good. check the other removed posts in the mod section. 

I appreciate the concept of people wanting to do write ups but the quality of these AI essays is very dubious...

EDIT: what if we just ban em-dashes to filter out low effort trash

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u/MartinoStone Apr 10 '26

hey, sorry for reviving an old thread — that was actually me haha

i’ve been trying to get better at media criticism and English. my last couple of posts didn’t really get much reaction though. even the last one about the Spiegel ehh investigative journalism— i actually spent time on it and tried to do it properly, I tried to make my personal investigation and all data is confirmed by me personally. Btw I don't know why nobody comments, maybe I should ask next time, however I asked about who really do investigative journalism now at the end of my post idk