Thanks for the detailed information Craig. It’s a massive change that is hard for us oldsters to grasp, but many of us know from experience that in the business world it’s adapt or die. Resisting change leads to loss of market share and, often, failure.
I like Russ and will miss him. I liked Paul B. even more. Perhaps you can run special reports by them occasionally and they can use AI or not to created them. When you read familiar authors like them for years, you get to know them and become loyal to them and their publication. Somehow I hope you can balance the use of AI to preserve this link between the writer and reader.
I’d also like to say that I love what you’ve done with FLYING. FLYING from the beginning has always been about the quality of the writing and the photographs. I fondly remember when Richard Bach wrote for them. Now we have Sam Weigel, who is one of the best, and you’ve unleashed Peter Garrison who seems to have more content. And the photography is excellent. I really think it’s a better publication.
So, use AI in a balanced way. Continue to be open and transparent. Keep up the good work. It’s a brave new world. I predict you’ll succeed but the market has the final vote.
I’ve been a daily reader for 27 years! First thing I do when opening my email.
Already horribly disappointed by IFR Magazine being closed down by Firecrown this year. Just found out Aviation Consumer is going digital only, and who knows how long that will last. My favorite, trusted pilot magazine. I like it because there’s no advertisements, no worry about being compromised by marketing/big business. Now fire Russ? Really? Don’t you think AvWeb is the thing that binds this all together? I could instantly tell this week from reading the articles that something was different. Junk articles with no useful content reviewing headsets and handheld radios. My first thought was Sporty’s or Aircraft Spruce somehow sponsored them, as I couldn’t figure out why they were in AvWeb. Now it is obvious that they are AI written. Looks just like the junk I get when I ask online to compare sunscreens or mowers. I am signing up for Russ’ new service. Goodbye.
Craig, I guess I need clarification on what constitutes journalism vs. reporting.
In my mind, “reporting” is self explanatory - you’re reporting on events or facts that occur, hopefully without bias or inflection.
Journalism is different, it is “added value” to reporting. To me, journalism will begin with the reporting but adds: further investigation, fact checking, implications of the events that occurred and how this affects the readership/public (i.e. why does this matter to me) ,in-depth analysis of the facts leading to the event and next steps that will follow from the event, interviews with people involved in the event; their comments/perspectives, further probing under the questioning form a reporter. These factors cannot be generated by AI and we, as readers, are likely to become less informed and less involved in the story.
I don’t need to just know what happened, I need to know why it happened, why it’s important, what are the implications, who was responsible. NOT just “What and When” it happened.
Craig respectfully, that’s your job and it’s how your publications deliver value to the reader.
The new strategic - and editorial direction of this publication appears to be set. This is how the cookie crumples. A real shame - but there is always a risk involved when deciding to let a longstanding and highly respected aviation publication be acquired by a large corporate entity.
So far, attempts to engage Mr. Fuller have failed and some feeling tells me, any further effort is likely futile. What was said in 2023 is past and forgotten history.
AVweb will not be able to keep its unique style and the hasty recycling of old content by editors without any considerable aviation experience will eventually reflect.
Things change and maybe this domain will some day be sold back to someone with a different attitude about aviation news, writing, journalism and publishing.
I will chime in here as well as unsubscribe and be gone effective right after this post. Moving to AI just continues to dumb down society which already is dumbed down from “smart” phones. That created the short attention span syndrome.
I can recognize AI immediately in the first few sentences: overuse of adjectives and adverbs for example that no human would ever string together in writing or speech. Further, AI has no personality. It doesn’t have a sense of humor, can’t tell a first person perspective story, and certainly can’t replace what makes us all human: we are all unique and have our own characteristics. (Russ and others who are no longer here reflected all of that).
In any event, this is the future and I won’t be a part of it. Big corporate media conglomerates have snapped up and ruined magazines that I subscribed to since the 1980s (like Flying), have snapped up local city radio stations where the local connection is gone, and as in this case, snapped up websites. It becomes stale and impersonal. That’s regression, not progress.
So I’m wheels up out of here and heading to where others are for the stories and personalities we missed.
What attracted me to AVweb was that it was an “aviation news site” — aviation, not lifestyle, mind you — “providing breaking news and information”. (Source: jjbaker above, quoting FLYING Media Group in 2023.)
You doth protest so much about using LLM tools, but you are missing the point: you are losing focus on the “breaking news and information” related to “aviation”. You are turning AVweb into a lifestyle blog.
And you are breaking the personal presence and accountability of the writers to the readers. It is telling that you don’t have enough of a presence in this forum that I can address you with an @-reference like @CraigFuller . It is telling that you have not published an announcement that those writers whom you fired are no longer present at AVweb.
And, your claims that “Our official policy is that any writer who publishes content, whether AI-assisted or not, is responsible for every single word.” are belied by the fluff published under the “Editorial Staff” byline.
All this adds up to: you are removing the value that AVweb used to deliver to me as a reader. That may not matter to the enterprise: I’m just one reader. I don’t pay the enterprise anything but my attention and what your surveillance gathers from me. But still, you are losing me.
Yep, I’ll echo what most of the other commenters here have already said. AI tends to produce soulless garbage that can be spotted a mile away. Only a complete idiot would fail to recognize the asset that this publication had in Russ Niles.
I have to be honest, when I first heard about the acquisition of Belvoir, I feared that the publications would lose both their quality and their personality, and that seems to be the case in spades. I’m glad that Russ has landed on his feet with a new site. I will enjoy reading his work there.
I’ve been reading AVweb’s email edition for decades, long enough to watch the format evolve. Lately though, I click less—not for lack of good reporting, but because the comment section often feels like a hangar full of naysayers.
AI seems to be the latest target in all media sources. Some claim they can “spot it a mile away.” I’m not convinced. I use AI daily in my business, and learning to use it well has been a game changer. For years, drafting a contract meant a month-long wait and a $3,000 bill from my lawyer. The last two? I drafted them with AI, sent them for review, and had them back in 24 hours for $200. Faster, cheaper, and probably better because I’d spent more time refining them myself vs expecting the lawyer to “know what I meant”.
I tell people AI is like a child prodigy who’s also two years old—capable of brilliance, but prone to drawing on the walls if you’re not paying attention. The value comes from guiding it, not fearing it.
I also remember a line that stuck with me: AI won’t take your job. The person who learns to use it better than you will. I’ve seen that play out, producing better work in a quarter of the time. That’s not magic, it’s adaptation.
So maybe the real question isn’t “Can I spot AI?” but “Am I learning to use the tools shaping my world?" If the end result still informs and entertains, why fixate on the process instead of the product?
And for the record—this entire comment was written by AI. If you didn’t notice until now, well, that says something too.
