This article is yet another “AI is scary” hooey spew.

Except there is no critical thinking here whatsoever.

I worked as a journalist. I cannot tell you how many times people gave me bombastic narrative that fell apart in three seconds when I did basic research.

Not deep diving. Basic research.

I am not going over every flaw in this piece (and there are too many to count) because I did that in another life when I was still writing media criticism books, but I will give one example here:

There are signs that this strategy has been extraordinarily successful, with BBM boasting in 2025 that its network of sites had surpassed 50 million page views per month. It’s difficult to verify a site’s traffic without access to its internal data, but the analytics service Similarweb corroborates the claim that BBM is pulling in vast audiences, estimating that over the past year its network of publications has attracted an average of 64.7 million visitors per month. According to a recent ranking, that would make it one of the 30 most trafficked English-language media enterprises on the web, with a total digital readership substantially higher than that of NPR, narrowly besting CBS News and Forbes, and just slightly behind the Washington Post.

This boast is problematic. The authors admit that they didn’t independently verify it, and this is crucial. You can’t run to Similarweb because you don’t know how and what they measure, or now how to rig numbers.

There are two ways to independently verify numbers such as these, and one way is by looking at the comments articles generate, and to see how often social media users post those articles. Small websites may have a quiet following, but when people boast of big numbers, they cannot fall back on quiet followers.

Second, we don’t know how those numbers got there: is it grassroots humans or bots? It makes a huge difference. When I had my site hosted on Squarespace, I knew a lot about who was on my website: their IP, city, browser, and computer. I knew when they were on my website, what pages they were reading, and for how long. I could map out who was emailing my articles and to whom with ease. Even though my numbers were nowhere near a publication such as the New York Times, I still had a large enough readership that I could see statistically significant patterns and analyze the data.

And I could be precise: I could tell you the demographic and psychographic of my readership. Futurism never bothered asking questions: tell us about your readership. You push back; you don’t back up a claim someone has a vested interest in making.

Because the point of this propaganda piece is AI Slop is taking over the world. Futurism proves human slop has always been there contaminating journalism until it lost all credibility.