Are We Stealing from Writers? A Closer Look at AI Summaries and Medium’s Pay Structure
Disclaimer: This article was written with help of ChatGPT and you can find whole discussions here
Content and facts are completely mine and AI was used as co-editor to improve language and structure of the story.
Want outline? Click here
The Challenge of Reading in the Digital Age of Abundance
The idea for this article stemmed from a decade-long problem I’ve faced: given only 10 minutes to read, how do I choose from 10 articles, each requiring 10 minutes to read?
In today’s world, where information is abundantly available, people have adapted their reading habits. They use a various speed reading techniques, skimming and scanning methods. Research was even done that found that people read in F-Pattern.
For me its very hard for me to read an article that has no visual structure, and it is just a wall of text. It’s just too much effort make sense of it. So I was just closing this kind of articles for years.
Today, AI technologies like ChatGPT enable us to create outlines for articles lacking clear structure.
This is something I found myself doing this year with articles I read.
A Writer’s Perspective on AI Summarisation
Curious about a writer’s perspective, I shared these insights with a friend who’s an avid Medium writer.
To my surprise his reaction was “you cannot do it”.
I spend time writing articles that take 10 minutes to read. Each writer has its own style and way of writing. Summaries cut down this to 2 seconds while losing all of it. Moreover, as a writer on Medium, I am paid based on the amount of time people spend reading my articles. Cutting down this to two seconds by summarising with ChatGPT results in me getting less money. That results in me writing less. So the network effect of this activity negatively impacts the amount of content being written.
Implications on Medium’s Reader-Writer Economy
I was surprised by this kind of view. Another surprise was that claps no longer correlate directly to writers’ earnings. Something didn’t sit well for me with this. Ultimately, the value isn’t in how long I read an article, but in the quality of insights I gain from it with minimal effort from my side. Good markets make exchange of value efficient. You spend less resources to provide value and I had less friction to pay you for it in return. Whole ecosystem prospers.
It’s sad to consider that Medium may inadvertently be encouraging writers to extend their articles unnecessarily to gain more reading time, and thus, more pay. While it also impacts the reader who ends up spending more time than needed to gain the same value. Essentially, it feels like a cycle where both parties attempt to outsmart the other — writers through clickbait and lengthening, readers through speed-reading techniques or AI summaries. Both sides feel like they are being stolen from. It’s a type of wrong incentive structure that actually makes whole system work worse. Is this the kind of market dynamic we want to foster, or can we envision a more symbiotic relationship between readers and writers?
The crux of the issue is the inherent difficulty in measuring the value of reading. In reality we would want to reward writers for having positive effect on reader’s life. And allow reader to share part of the benefit back with the writer. But it’s very hard thing to measure value user gets. So we have what we have.
A Deeper Dive Into Medium’s Payment Structure with surprising implications
Let’s take a look at Medium documentation. How it calculates payments to writers? You can see that they are splitting members subscription money between the writers whose articles member read. And its based on how much time relatively he spent reading them.
That relative time is an important detail here.
It’s not about absolute time of reading! It’s about relative time of reading.
If that’s accurate, it carries interesting implications for readers like me.
If I use ChatGPT summarisation for most articles. Most of articles will get only couple of seconds reading time from me. But my membership fee will still be split between all of them based on those seconds. But articles that actually contain something interesting are articles that I will return to and read in more detail. Such article outlines actually allow me to get some initial feel for the article, go and read it in its entirety if it looks promising.
Can Outlines Benefit the Reader-Writer Relationship?
Now what is interesting is what if writer actually provides these outline. Some writers may be reluctant to do that because it may lower reading time for some users. Thus they will get less money. But for readers like me — they actually will remove the need to go to ChatGPT. So I will stay at the page, check the outline, scan the article In some cases I will quickly decide that its not worth spending more then 2 seconds on it, yes. However, if an article truly holds value for me, I would undoubtedly spend more time reading it. It promotes better practices of writing to deliver value and not waste user time.
I have a feeling that in general this should have a positive effect on reader and writer economy. Asking ChatGPT for advise on how to write a better article 3rd suggestion it gave was:
Subheadings: You might consider adding more subheadings to break up the text and make it easier for your readers to skim. For instance, a subheading could be used to introduce the part where you discuss Medium's payment model or the implications of ChatGPT.
This should result in a more efficient exchange of value between writers and readers. Finding and reading content that actually has impact on them. More often and faster then before.
Will this lower overall reading time on the platform? No, it just that people will be reading what they actually want to be reading. That is a better deal for readers, we actually may end up with more of them on the platform. And they will be more happy with what they are getting and more willing to be a member. Writers would only win from that.
Contribute to the Conversation
It’s hard to conclusively determine whether this approach benefits writers. My intuition leans towards it being advantageous, but this hypothesis needs testing — perhaps via an AB test. But how could we implement this?
I welcome your thoughts on this matter, dear reader. Feel free to leave a comment!
I’ve decided to try providing this kind of outline in my future articles, and I’ve begun with this one. Initially, I was undecided about whether to place the article outline at the top or bottom. I’ve chosen the latter, but included a link to it from the top. Note that the outline also contains links back to specific sections of the article.
I hope you’ve found value in this exploration. If so, please show your support with a clap!
Outline
- The Challenge of Reading in the Digital Age of Abundance
“Given only 10 minutes to read, how do I choose from 10 articles, each requiring 10 minutes to read?” (link) - A Writer’s Perspective on AI Summarisation
“As a writer on Medium, I am paid based on the amount of time people spend reading my articles. Cutting down this to two seconds by summarising with ChatGPT results in me getting less money. That results in me writing less.” (link) - Implications on Medium’s Reader-Writer Economy
“Medium may inadvertently be encouraging writers to extend their articles unnecessarily to gain more reading time, and thus, more pay.” (link) - A Deeper Dive Into Medium’s Payment Structure with Surprising Implications
“Medium calculates payments to writers by splitting members subscription money between the writers whose articles the member read, based on how much time relatively they spent reading them. It’s not about absolute time of reading! It’s about relative time of reading.” (link) - Can Outlines Benefit the Reader-Writer Relationship?
“If a writer actually provides an outline, they could remove the need for readers to go to ChatGPT. If an article truly holds value, I would undoubtedly spend more time reading it.” (link) - Contribute to the Conversation
“It’s hard to conclusively determine whether this approach benefits writers. My intuition leans towards it being advantageous. Feel free to leave a comment!” (link)
