I visited Buzzfeed yesterday for the first time in several months. I don’t remember why.

I spent a few minutes looking over the recent articles, mostly the headlines but I clicked on a couple. I came away with a strong sense that the site was very much on its last legs. I can’t really explain why it felt that way but it did. In fact, I second guessed myself and went back a bit later to look at it again.

What was it about the site that felt so busy and empty at the same time, sort of like the row of games at a low-rent carnival. There are lots of flashy attention grabbing headlines and images but you get the feeling the carnies working behind the scene just want to empty your wallet. Maybe that was always the case but it feels even more the case now.

When I made my visit to the site yesterday, I honestly was not aware that some of the carnies behind the scenes might be robots, but it’s true. Buzzfeed has openly been publishing “AI-assisted content.” They started with listicles which, to be fair, a machine should be able to write or at least help write. But yesterday Futurism published an article noting this experiment in AI-assisted content has quietly taken another step.

This month, we noticed that with none of the fanfare of Peretti’s multiple interviews about the quizzes, BuzzFeed quietly started publishing fully AI-generated articles that are produced by non-editorial staff — and they sound a lot like the content mill model that Peretti had promised to avoid.

The 40 or so articles, all of which appear to be SEO-driven travel guides, are comically bland and similar to one another. Check out these almost-copied lines:

• “Now, I know what you’re thinking – ‘Cape May? What is that, some kind of mayonnaise brand?'” in an article about Cape May, in New Jersey.
• “Now I know what you’re thinking – ‘but Caribbean destinations are all just crowded resorts, right?'” in an article about St Maarten, in the Caribbean.
• “Now, I know what you’re thinking. Puerto Rico? Isn’t that where all the cruise ships go?” in an article about San Juan, in Puerto Rico.
• “Now, I know what you’re thinking- bigger isn’t always better,” in an article about Providence, in Rhode Island.

Those are only about half the examples offered. You have to really admire the hollowness of a robot writing the phrase “Now, I know what you’re thinking” over and over as a way to create a false sense of intimacy. The robot definitely does not know what you’re thinking. And of course this is just one example. There are other repeated phrases (“hidden gem”) which appear in many of these robot-written articles.

Futurism asked Buzzfeed how the articles were written/generated and it turns out the polled their own non-writing staff about their travel picks. It was an “experiment” to see what the AI could do with human provided prompts. The human authors of the Futurism piece aren’t impressed.

Perusing the memo Peretti sent to BuzzFeed staffers back in January, it’s hard to trace his sunny verbiage to these dismal, SEO-bait travel guides. In it, Peretti also took pains to suggest that human writers wouldn’t be replaced, saying instead that AI will work in tandem with “creative humans like us.”

It sounds like Buzzfeed is experimenting with publishing articles written by non-writers, something which I’m sure would save them quite a bit of money if it worked. I guess the good news is that we’re still not at the point where you can’t tell the humans from the robots.

Anyway, I really didn’t know about this yesterday but maybe this is part of what gave me the sense the site was not what it once was (even if what it once was wasn’t ever really my thing).