Max Read: Reporting on the Big, Bad Internet

Summary

Paul Ford and Rich Ziade welcome Max Read, the longtime journalist and author of the popular “Read Max” newsletter on Substack, for a wide-ranging conversation about AI’s impact on media, culture, and the creative economy. Read, a former editor at Gawker who now writes about the intersection of technology and culture for 60,000 subscribers, shares his perspective as someone who uses AI tools like Claude for ideation and transcription while maintaining skepticism about their ability to replace human-authored prose.

The conversation explores whether AI-generated content is fundamentally “bad” and what transparency should look like when humans use AI to augment their writing. Read introduces the concept of “remainder humanism” from Leif Weatherby’s book “Language Machines” — the idea that writing must come from a human to be worthwhile — and pushes back against it while arguing that the practice of writing remains important for human thought, much like exercise for the body. The hosts discuss whether the first major scandal of a columnist getting caught using AI is imminent, and whether generational attitudes will shift the stigma around AI-assisted writing.

The episode also dives into the emerging world of AI-generated video content, from Sora’s social network features to Zing, a platform producing all-AI shows including a controversial October 7th miniseries with 6 million views. The hosts debate whether “slop” (unwanted AI-generated content) will dominate feeds, or whether craft will find higher ground, as it did when 3D animation tools actually lengthened rather than shortened movie production timelines.

Highlights

”FYP Core — naming music trends with Claude”

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“I fired up Claude and I was like, here’s what this thing I’m trying to describe is. Can you help me come up with some names? And it didn’t come up with the name, but what it’s really good at is just giving you a bunch of related concepts that you can mess around with yourself. So we came up with FYP Core.” — Max Read, 9:05

”Writing is exercise for the mind”

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“I’m never going to lift a car up, right? But I go to the gym anyway because I know it’s good for my body and my mind and presumably my soul to stay fit. And I think that writing has that same quality. Sitting down to think through an issue and spend a lot of time agonizing and moving those words around — the process itself is illuminating.” — Max Read, 14:30

”We’re not far from not being able to tell”

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“We can all agree I don’t want to read an op-ed written in ChatGPT voice. But the pace of progress and the sophistication — we’re not far away from not noticing, not being able to tell. We’re just not far away.” — Rich Ziade, 12:40

”Never underestimate people’s willingness to watch garbage”

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“You should never underestimate the willingness of people to watch stuff that has no human thought or intent or whatever behind it if it’s just filling up time and space.” — Max Read, 15:35

”October 7th, the all-AI miniseries”

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“There’s a network, a pseudo Netflix of all AI generated content. They made an October 7th miniseries, all AI generated. 6 million views. It might be the most tasteless thing I’ve ever seen in my life.” — Paul Ford, 22:30

Key Points

• Read Max newsletter (1:41) - Max Read’s Substack covering culture and technology has 60,000 readers, costs $5/month or $50/year
• Substack economics (2:10) - Substack takes 10% cut, provides great CMS, handles marketing funnel; Read got a one-year advance to start
• From Gawker to Substack (3:40) - Read went from general journalism at New York Magazine to covering tech platforms after Facebook’s pivot to video blew up digital media
• AI for transcription (7:15) - The technology that has transformed every journalist Read knows is AI transcription, which has “added days to my life”
• FYP Core concept (9:05) - Read coined this term with Claude’s help to describe music like Benson Boon’s that exists primarily as TikTok soundtracks
• Lance Armstrong analogy (11:10) - If everyone’s using AI, should we just have a “steroid league” for writing?
• Waiting for the first scandal (11:50) - Read expects a major op-ed columnist to be caught using AI-generated content soon
• Remainder humanism (14:10) - From Leif Weatherby’s “Language Machines” — the position that writing must come from a human to be worthwhile
• 3D animation didn’t speed up movies (16:20) - When 3D tools arrived, production timelines actually got longer as craft found higher ground
• Sora as social network (20:30) - Sora had initial juice partly because it was social — people love putting their friends’ faces in things
• Zing platform (22:30) - All-AI generated content platform with shows getting millions of views, including a controversial October 7th miniseries
• Slop defined (24:20) - “Weird fake AI crap” or as Rich calls it, “content harassment”
• WGA and AI (18:30) - The writers’ union contract prevents executives from forcing AI use but lets writers use it themselves
• Internet warfare pattern (26:00) - Sides get picked between utopian and luddite, then five years later no one remembers the fight

Mentions

Companies

• Substack (2:10) - Read’s newsletter platform, takes 10% cut, provides CMS and marketing tools
• Gawker (11:40) - Read was editor; produced thousands of blog posts in a SoHo former sweatshop
• New York Magazine (1:28) - Where Read wrote about technology and culture before going independent
• Facebook/Meta (3:55) - Their pivot to video in 2012 disrupted digital media and shaped Read’s career trajectory
• OpenAI (12:00) - Makers of ChatGPT; their reinforcement feedback creates distinctive AI voice
• Zing (22:30) - All-AI content platform; zingroll.com
• Sora (20:30) - OpenAI’s video generation tool used on social media
• WGA (18:30) - Writers Guild of America, where Read is a member

People

• Max Read (0:25) - Journalist, author of Read Max newsletter, former Gawker editor
• Benson Boon (8:20) - Mark Zuckerberg’s favorite musician; exemplifies “FYP Core” music made for TikTok
• Leif Weatherby (14:10) - Academic, author of “Language Machines,” coined “remainder humanism”
• Tressie McMillan Cottom (10:10) - Public intellectual who refuses to use ChatGPT

Products & Technologies

• Claude (7:30) - Read’s preferred AI tool for ideation and brainstorming
• ChatGPT (12:00) - Referenced for its distinctive RLHF-shaped voice; “That’s a great idea”
• Facebook Vibes (20:00) - Meta’s AI video feature, appears to be a flop

Surprising Quotes

“When you do something like produce thousands of blog posts that I don’t even remember, just in the hopes that somebody Googling something will maybe pass by them and click on an ad, you lose that romantic attachment very quickly.” — Max Read, 11:40

“We have a channel which is just when ChatGPT says ‘That’s a great idea.’ You just paste in the words ‘that’s a great idea.’” — Paul Ford, 12:20

“I call it content harassment.” — Rich Ziade, 24:20

“Doppelganger on Myrtle Ave in Clinton Hill has a $5 draft. I can’t remember what kind of beer.” — Max Read, 34:00

Transcript

0:00 I’m Paul Ford. And I’m Rich Ziade. And this is the Aboard Podcast. A podcast about how AI is changing the world of software and many other things. Rich. Yes, Paul. I’m not in my usual seat because there’s somebody else here today. Surprise guest. Surprise guest. And what we found is that when we put them in the middle, they have to do this a lot. So, you and I are on the side of the table. We’re going to talk to Max Read.

0:47 Yeah. It’s a great name. It’s a great guy. Let’s find out what he thinks about AI. Oh my god, we’re back. We are. Yeah, it was good. That was a good theme song play. Max, hi. Hi, Paul. How are you? I’m doing fine.

1:02 Introduce the world to Max. I’ve known Max for a very very long time. Max is a very seasoned journalist and commentator around the culture industry in New York City. One of a relatively small group of people who’s truly engaged with online culture but also culture culture. Not a valley guy, a New York guy who is trying to make sense of it all on behalf of his readers. After stints at lots of different publications including New York Magazine, did the Substack thing and has been doing it now for years. 4 years in October.

1:41 It’s your living now, right? It’s what you do. Yeah. It’s the way I make most of my money. What is the name of it? It’s called Read Max. That’s good, man. You took about 10 seconds to come up with that name. It’s strong. How’d you get the SEO on though? Yeah, it’s hard. There’s a genome read company called ReadMax and that’s the big competition right now.

2:10 Do you work for Substack? No, I consider myself self-employed. I use Substack as my main newsletter provider. They take a 10% cut of my earnings in exchange for which they use their CMS which I have to say is fantastic. I am a seasoned user of CMSs and they’ve got a great CMS. They have a lot of the email newsletter marketing funnel stuff, recommendations, algorithmic ways of bringing in subscribers.

2:56 How long did it take for this to become like your job job? I was lucky enough to be part of a class of Substack writers that got a one-year advance. So I got paid in quarterly installments by Substack up to the point where I was making as much money as they had offered me. Then it took maybe a year or two after that to really fully feel like this was a sustainable proposition.

3:40 I’ve been writing about culture and technology and the many ways they intersect for a long time. When Facebook did its big pivot to video back in 2012 and kind of blew up digital media, all of a sudden I found myself thinking constantly about platforms and about the tech industry. I wrote a big kind of manifesto when I started — the way we organize ourselves, the Fordist paradigm of Henry Ford’s factories is on its way out and we should be thinking about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg in similar terms.

4:40 Fall 2021, the only thing anybody wanted to talk about was crypto. And so I spent a year writing about crypto. As the bubble burst and FTX imploded, AI and especially OpenAI and ChatGPT were bringing up the hype rear. For the last couple years I’ve been writing a lot about AI, which is so much more pleasurable to write about than crypto. Partly because it’s weirder and stranger and doing more interesting things.

5:40 AI. Yeah. So here’s where we’re at. We’re nerds. We build software things and we saw it coming and it smacked us in the face. I did a bunch of vibe coding this weekend and I’m like, wow, it’s so radically transformative on a day-to-day basis. Do you use any of these tools to get your work done?

7:15 Yeah, I use Claude for a bunch of different things. The thing that’s transformed basically every journalist I know is transcribing interviews. The technology is so fantastic for that. It has added days to my life by doing that. I use Claude a lot for ideating. I do a lot of writing where I’ll identify a trend and I’ll want to come up with the neologism to assign to it because that’s good marketing.

9:05 I wrote about Benson Boon. He played at the Grammys and I realized I’d never heard this guy. I knew the song because it was the soundtrack to half of all TikTok videos. I fired up Claude and was like, here’s what this thing is that I’m trying to describe. Can you help me come up with some names? It didn’t come up with the name, but it’s really good at giving you a bunch of related concepts. So we came up with FYP Core. FYP is the “for you page” on TikTok.

10:10 There’s a public intellectual I really like, Tressie McMillan Cottom. She doesn’t use ChatGPT and it’s driving everybody crazy. But her job is literally to interpret society and critique it. I think it’s okay. Like, I didn’t want Lance Armstrong to be on steroids either. I wanted to see what he could get up to just going up the hill.

11:10 Somebody made an argument that if everybody’s going to use steroids, just have a steroid baseball league. And there was the era in Major League Baseball where everybody was juicing. So just deregulate. But what I want is transparency. Someone sent us a document the other day and it was clearly AI-assisted. She had let it go and now it was on us to parse and boil it down.

12:00 I have an instinct that it’s bad. But I’m not always sure I could articulate specifically what’s bad about it. So much of what we’re looking at with AI is less a truly new epoch and more just building on stuff that’s already happened. What insane reinforcement feedback creates is really a product of tweaking the major chatbots to sound the way they sound. We can tell when ChatGPT has written something. “That’s a great idea.”

13:30 Claude’s asking for access to my email, right? ChatGPT doesn’t know that I’ve ever written anything. It’s not going to draw that connection. So it doesn’t know that I have a tone or a voice. They haven’t worked that out yet. They will.

14:10 There’s a great book called “Language Machines” by Leif Weatherby and he describes “remainder humanism” — this sort of position of retreat where you insist there’s something ineffably human about writing. I want to resist that, but writing as a practice is really important to human thought. I have the exercise metaphor: I’m never going to lift a car up, but I go to the gym anyway because it’s good for my body and my mind. Writing has that same quality.

15:35 I have a suspicion that we prefer to consume things made by human beings because they’re other human beings that we can think about intent. There’s a social aspect to it. But something that has been shown to me by my career is that you should never underestimate the willingness of people to watch stuff that has no human thought or intent behind it if it’s just filling up time and space.

16:20 When 3D showed up for making animated films, a lot of people thought the acceleration would push a dozen movies out a year. But as the tech got better, the actual time it takes to make these movies has gotten longer rather than faster. Craft often finds higher ground. Inside Out is less about the 3D effects and more about story and character and all the classic things.

18:30 I’m a screenwriter and I’m in the WGA. During the strike, AI was a huge issue. The way the contract ended up getting written, it effectively prevents executives from forcing writers to use AI or from replacing writers with AI, but carves out as much space as we want to use AI ourselves. That seems to be the right way — reject it as a tool to drive down the price of your labor.

20:00 Have you seen Facebook Vibes? It seems like Vibes is a flop. Sora is interesting because for a little while it seemed to have some juice. Part of it was it was actually a social network. People love their faces. They love to clown on their friends. Fake videos of pressure cookers exploding are now all over Instagram. But that’s Sora being used as a production tool, not a social network.

22:30 There’s a network, a pseudo Netflix of all AI generated content. They made an October 7th miniseries, all AI generated. 6 million views. It might be the most tasteless thing I’ve ever seen in my life. There’s also Iron Jaw, and just Liam — “a high octane ride of grit, passion, and speed.” 2.5 million views.

24:20 Do you find all this depressing? I find the slop itself depressing. Define slop. Weird fake AI crap is like the easiest way to describe it. I call it content harassment. As a longtime fan of cyberpunk as a genre, anything weird online I’m immediately like, so cool, we live in the future. And then a lot of me is like, oh, this sucks. This is just depressing.

26:00 For people in this room, we’re veterans of internet warfare. What happens is you get incredibly forceful sides picked. One is utopian, one is absolutely luddite. And then five years later no one can even remember they were fighting because there’s some new thing.

33:00 If somebody wanted to subscribe to your Substack, they can find me at maxread.substack.com. It’s $5 a month or $50 a year. Roughly the price of a cheapish beer in New York City. Can you get a $5 beer? Doppelganger on Myrtle Ave in Clinton Hill has a $5 draft.

35:00 If you go to aboard.com, you can tell it the software you need. It’s an industrial strength powerhouse that builds software in a very accelerated way for your business. Custom software used to be incredibly expensive and now it is not. Check it out at aboard.com.

36:30 Like and subscribe. Email hello@aboard.com. Subscribe to Read Max. Max, thank you for coming on. Thank you so much for having me. Let’s go. Have a great week. Bye.