While we are not quite there yet, I wonder if GPT4 or 5 (hypothetically) will allow these businesses to fire most of their workers.
While investigations are hard, writing a piece with no substance for clickbait doesn't seem that hard, and then you just have someone proof-read and post it. Your cost would be very close to 0 and the articles would carry just as much substance as they would have if written by a human being.
The Intercept posted recently that their subscriber numbers have plummeted since Trump left office (and they can no longer post clickbait political yellow journalism).
I suspect the same thing happened to HuffPost. They can't dunk on Trump with 50 articles a day so the money is gone.
Trump was the best thing to happen to the media, because of the billions in ad and subscriber revenue he gave to them. He paused the news industry decline, which will now continue.
In the long run, I wonder how clickbait can be a viable business model for an organization such as BuzzFeed. If you think about it, clickbait is designed to be disappointing.
The goal is to make the subject seem much more interesting than it really is - otherwise you wouldn't need clickbait for people to be interested in it. Faced with the fact that all your content is a letdown in some way, how does that not condition your userbase to be dissatisfied with your brand and it's content?
I know BuzzFeedNews is supposed to be legitimate, but I just can't see it as anything other than an arm of a business that produces chum.