Imagine if AI killed clickbait

There used to be (maybe still is) a Twitter account called Saved You A Click. It shares the links to clickbait articles and reveals the mundane answers to the extravagant questions posed by the headline.

As time goes on the line between clickbait and headline best practice is getting increasingly blurred. For instance, Medium supposedly doesn’t allow clickbait, yet have you ever scrolled for more than a couple of minutes without seeing at least something that seems remarkably like it?

You get AI! And you get AI! And YOU get AI!

I’m tired of headlines telling me I’m doing X wrong and that I absolutely must start doing Y. That I’ll never be successful without A and that I’m already a failure because I do B.

I’m exhausted by piece after piece that delivers mundane, banal, worthless advice, insight or information, hidden behind a promise to change the universe.

And I wonder if AI could make it all go away.

Which would be ironic, wouldn’t it? Most people are trying to use things like ChatGPT to pump out more of this kind of crap. But maybe we can use this evil against itself; fight fire with fire.

Putting great technology to great use

Don’t get me wrong, I think AI technology is amazing and it will do some great things. But I’m just so damn tired of it already. It’s amazing how something can go from being fresh and innovative to being trite and cliche in such a short amount of time.

It’s ironic that the fear when it first launched was that people would use it to flood the internet full of repetitive, cliche shit, but actually it’s people who flooded the internet with repetitive, cliche shit, by parroting the same few things about ChatGPT.

No one even needed to switch the tool on. Everyone’s on about prompts and how if you don’t start using it you’re going to miss out, and how it’s going to take your job, and how it’s not going to take your job.

Death to clickbait

However, I think ‘clickbait killer’ is a use case I can get behind. Imagine an integrated feature in your social feed, or a browser extension, that could follow the link through to articles, parse the content, and summarise it in an accurate, non-sensational way.

Similar things are already being done. Amazon uses AI to create meta-reviews: condensing sometimes thousands of reviews down into a paragraph that summarises to common pros and cons. Paste something into ChatGPT and ask it to summarise it, and it will. The technology is there – all we need is someone to apply it to this particular problem.

Because come on, aren’t you even a little bit tired of the bombardment of promises, secrets, commandments, orders, and warnings that you have to wade through? Don’t you often click through to read an article to find it’s nothing like what you were expecting, or that it really doesn’t deliver against its promise?

De-baiting content: an example

Here’s an example of how this could work: there are lots of articles on Medium about content repurposing – that’s taking a piece of content (like a blog, podcast or video) you have already created, and reusing it in different forms to create more content and engage people on different platforms.

It’s a very legitimate strategy with a lot of value. I’m a content marketer: I get it. After all, why let good ideas go to waste because you’ve used them once?

But lots of the articles on Medium about content repurposing have a clickbait problem. The headline is always something like ‘How to turn one article into 50 articles’. The method is always this: write one article, then take each section of that article and write an article about that, then take each section of those articles and…you get the idea.

There is nothing wrong with this approach. It’s great. The problem is that it is always packaged (and that’s not just the headline’s fault, by the way, the whole article usually tries to maintain the illusion) as though you’re going to learn this great method for turning one thing you’ve written into lots of different pieces of content. I.e. a shortcut. Which would be great for time-starved content creators like me.

What articles like these actually are, though, is how to turn one topic idea into 50 articles. And I’m repeating myself, but I want to make absolutely clear, this is completely fine and valid. But the ‘secret’ to getting 50 articles is…write 50 articles. It’s that classic productivity ‘hack’ that tries to make doing the work sound simple and easy.

A more truthful internet

An AI powered click-bait identifier could understand what the article is actually saying, just like I do as I sigh deeply to myself 30 seconds after clicking on the headline, and then offer up an alternative title that is more reflective of the value and insights you’re actually going to get.

It would rewrite ‘How to turn one article into 50’ into something like ‘You’ve written one article – here’s a framework that will help you use it as the starting point for 49 more’.

It’s not sexy (or short). It won’t make your heart race. It’s not going to get anyone hot under the collar.

But you know what? It’s true. And that really would be a game changer.


Follow me on

Header photo by Anwaar Ali on Unsplash

Recommended Articles