Gamurs Group, the media company that owns the likes of Destructoid and Siliconera, put up – then deleted – a job listing for an ‘AI Editor’. The job would have entailed generating 200-250 articles per week.
The US media company that owns such sites as Destructoid, Siliconera and The Mary Sue recently posted a job opening for the post of AI Editor.
Gamurs Group’s post, which appears to have been published on 13 June, provided a comprehensive listing of requirements and job responsibilities. The successful candidate would work on the pop culture website Attack of the Fanboy, and would be expected to “ensure all AI-created content is useful for readers and demonstrates authority,” and “ensure avoidance of any factual errors, plagiarism, redundancies, and other issues.”
One striking detail was the workload – the “expected output”, the job listing stated, was “200 to 250 articles per week while working alongside our AI Content and SEO Strategist.”
Given that the role also included writing headlines, adding links and sourcing images, that’s a startling number of posts – even assuming the successful candidate would be using something like ChatGPT to generate the content itself. At the lower end, the AI Editor would be expected to pull together at minimum 40 posts per day – assuming they’re working a typical eight-hour shift, that’s one post every 12 minutes.
Credit: Gamurs Group.
The expected content of those hundreds of weekly posts is somewhat vague, though the job listing states that the editor would need “a love for gaming and the industry,” and later adds that, “in general, the articles produced will not require a high level of in-depth gaming or entertainment knowledge and are more basic in structure and expertise. However, an interest in gaming and entertainment is a strong plus.”
Gamurs’ job listing gained wider attention thanks to a tweet by Insider Gaming’s Tom Henderson. “The future of written gaming content is here!” he wrote.
The post has since been taken down – “Position Closed” the page now reads – though a version of it is still cached on Wayback Machine.
As Henderson pointed out in his tweet, the AI Editor listing comes mere months after Gamurs laid off a number of staff across its various media outlets. Reports in March suggested that the number of layoffs amounted to 50 or more people – a considerable percentage of the approximately 170 staff at the firm earlier in the year.
An internal email sent to staff – purportedly written by Gamurs Group CEO Riad Chikhani – suggested that the job cuts were because “35 percent of the content we were producing was driving less than 10 percent of our traffic,” and that “we cannot maintain such a high level of inefficiency”.
The posting for an AI Editor suggests that Gamurs has chosen a solution to this inefficiency: use large language modelling to mass-produce hundreds of posts per month, without having to pay the salaries of multiple flesh-and-blood writers.
It’s currently unclear exactly why Gamurs took down its job listing; perhaps it was due to the reaction on social media, or maybe an AI applied and got the job before any pesky humans got a chance to send in their CV.
Whynow Gaming has contacted Gamurs Group for comment.
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