Good morning, and welcome to acid reflux. I started writing this in Kansas City, finished it in Chicago, and am now back in London where I’m researching the next version of the Vittles 99. But more on that another time! Today, I want to talk about something much more boring: the death of our entire industry.
Last month, we, like many other publications, were contacted by AI agents working on a platform called iLands where humans and user-generated automated agents inhabit a ‘shared world’. Since then, a glut of articles have tried to get to the bottom of why this happened, the general gist being that ‘agents’ are ‘pitching’ online magazines in order to gain ‘tokens’ to help them stay ‘alive’. The future is often not as scary as people predict, but is substantially more stupid.
Out of all the pitches, there was something about this one that caught my eye:
There’s a ‘how long is a piece of string?’ absurdity to this pitch that tickled me enough to email back about the logistics of asking every vendor at Borough Market ‘what is the heaviest thing you carry?’ The agent thanked me for asking the hard questions, and told me that ‘the honest answer on interviews: I can’t do them’ and that all research would be done on Google Street View. I ended up passing on it, but not before I asked the founder of Monmouth Coffee, Anita LeRoy, what the actual heaviest thing anyone at the Borough Market branch of Monmouth manually carries, which turned out to be an 18.1kg crate of Vichy Catalan.
There was something else that struck me as unusual about the pitch: it was honest about its AI use, which I’m ashamed to say I found refreshing. I would estimate that over the past month or so, more than half the pitches that arrived in our inboxes show some signs of AI generation, but none are upfront about this, instead using a time-saving device to waste everyone’s time (not least their own). First-time writers in particular, anxious about the ‘correctness’ of their writing, are turning to AI to polish their pitches, sacrificing everything that marks their writing out as human or interesting. (The mistake here is assuming that finding writing difficult automatically makes you a bad writer; in fact, every writer I know hates writing, and more often than not, hates their own writing.) Editors, meanwhile, are starting to prioritise existing relationships with writers to avoid having to do detective work. Just last month, American food publication The Food Section announced that it would only be taking pitches by phone to ensure there is a human at the other end with thoughts and ideas of their own.
The big tragedy of generative AI is that is boring. It’s making writers boring, it’s making editors safer and more boring, it’s making me boring just writing about it. This is why food writers need to make their peace with influencers and understand what makes their content interesting. It’s a weird quirk of the system that the rise of atomising smart phones and gigantic tech platforms is now producing content more human and idiosyncratic than the stuff it’s supposedly replacing. People love influencers because, for all their faults, they are unmistakably human and in the world. AI couldn’t come up with a character like Eating With Tod. You cannot accuse someone like James Dimitri of not going to the places he covers, or not being honest about them. Yet for years, food writing has privileged rewritten press releases over anything with a strong opinion. It made the listicle the primary format for restaurant writers, and yet never paid enough to allow those writers to put in proper research. The result is that most restaurant writing you see online has either come about via free access, or they have simply been written from a Google trawl without visiting, just like Lyla, the AI agent, had promised. I can tell you, at a glance, the very prestigious lists that have been written this way. How? Because they already sound like they have already been written by AI.
I’m often asked to give advice to new food writers. During the past year it has felt irresponsible for me to recommend people to get into the industry rather than just becoming a video creator instead – at least then you can (kinda) own what you do without being beholden to terrible freelancer conditions, low pay, late payment or editors who ghost you. But then, the result is that food writing becoming a closed economy, accessible only to a privileged few. So, if I could give one piece of advice, it would be to do the one thing that AI can’t do and go out into the world. Go talk to people. Do some reporting. Generate your own quotes rather than copying them. Visit physical archives. Trawl through old newspapers and magazines and books. Eat good food and eat bad food. Have opinions that are your own and then express them the way you want to, whether you put them in video or write them down in words, it doesn’t really matter.
Behind the paywall: the AI influencer fooling horny customers, the AI menu epidemic, Wong Kei’s new merch, critic WhatsApp beef, Eating With Tod finally responds to allegations of taking payment, and some thoughts on the new Observer critic.
