Medium, a 12-year-old publishing platform, has undergone numerous pivots over the years and is now on a financial upswing. However, there is evidence that robot bloggers are increasingly using the platform. According to AI detection startup Pangram Labs, over 47 percent of the 274,466 recent posts analyzed were likely AI-generated. This is significantly higher than the 7 percent found on global news sites. The content on Medium tends to be banal, with tags like “NFT,” “web3,” “ethereum,” “AI,” and “pets” being the most likely to be AI-generated. Another AI detection startup, Originality AI, found that 40 percent of a sampling of Medium posts from 2024 were likely AI-generated, compared to just 3.4 percent in 2018. When contacted for comment, Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine rejected the idea that Medium has an AI issue and disputed the accuracy of the AI detection analyses. However, he did acknowledge that there has been a tenfold increase in AI-generated content on the platform since the beginning of the year and stated that Medium is strongly against AI content.
