Paul Graham Says AI Ends Ambiguous Clickbait
Paul Graham claims that AI has an unexpected benefit: clickbait titles that tease but do not clarify are becoming ineffective. Instead of clicking through to see "the new theory explaining x," he directly asks ChatGPT what that theory is.
This is another side of the same observation. He has just mentioned that long articles that take too long to get to the point will be replaced by shorter ones; now even the distribution tactic of "hiding the point first and then trading for clicks" is also failing. The title creates a gap, and the body is responsible for filling that gap with a fee—AI models have removed the need for sites to fill that gap.
He has long viewed density as a defense against summary walls: writing an article and then deleting parts can hurt the content, and summaries inevitably lose some points. Clickbait takes the opposite approach, deliberately leaving gaps. With a model that allows readers to ask immediate follow-up questions, gaps no longer need to be repaid with clicks. Previously, he could identify ghostwritten content from words like "delve" and hardcore news emails, comparing the experience of recognizing AI to being deceived.
Advertising and media metrics still rely on clicks and dwell time. Surveys from companies like BetterUp show that a significant amount of low-quality generated content is received in American workplaces, with about half of respondents lowering their evaluations of the sender's creativity, ability, and credibility. Related research from Ohio State University also indicates that recipients often interpret generated private messages as lazy and insincere. The metrics of traffic and trust are beginning to diverge.
Listicles, SEO long-form articles, and "you won't believe the reason" belong to the same inventory. The training corpus for models is already filled with this type of text, so it can produce clickbait while also exposing it to readers. Graham also finds ChatGPT's tone reminiscent of corporate communications and HR: it loves using upbeat bullet points, unlike real conversations around it.
In market mechanisms, buyers are readers who do not want to pay for a riddle with a click, while sellers are sites that rely on the gap in titles to recover advertising costs. Funding is shifting from click funnels to question interfaces. Beneficiaries are knowledge sources where answers can be extracted in a single sentence, and authors who have already written to the point of no longer hiding it; those under pressure are programmatic advertising, affiliate marketing, and content factories that bury conclusions on the third screen. The event-driven shift comes from the "right to explain" moving from links to dialogue boxes.
Additionally, he did not distinguish the proportions of academic preprints, product reviews, and gossip entertainment that are skipped, nor did he quantify how often the "theory reduction" provided by ChatGPT is incorrect.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Graham's two cuts target the same industry chain: attention must go through websites to become money. The first cut reduces length, while the second cuts suspense. Y Combinator started with application letters and blogs, and he experienced earlier than the media that "if you don't write clearly, you won't get the next conversation." Clickbait is a business model built on obscurity in the public internet; with the emergence of models, obscurity becomes a bypassable intermediary. A historical comparison is Google removing Yellow Pages queries from phone books, and Wikipedia making encyclopedia salespeople obsolete—this time, what is taken away is "you must click to know what it is."
Capital reactions will split into two paths. One path writes titles fuller, laying out facts that can be questioned upfront, trading brand for clicks rather than changing clicks; the other hides things that cannot be summarized by models—original data, positions, and responsible signatures—behind login walls. Programmatic advertising's thousand impressions will increasingly encounter "users have already asked elsewhere." The YC portfolio includes both early positions in OpenAI and companies reliant on content distribution, which is why he can speak so lightly about the "unexpected benefits."
The analogy is not the decline of traditional media, but the search killing portal navigation. BuzzFeed-style lists, Upworthy-style emotional headlines, and CIA-style "a report shows" all belong to the same fragile inventory. The industry has shifted from "controlling entry points" to "controlling irreducible judgments." Theories that can be answered in a question are no longer worth a click; responsibilities that cannot be answered in a question will leave sites.
Structural judgment belongs to technical substitution. The mechanism is: clickbait sells information asymmetry, and models reduce the cost of asymmetric queries to near zero. Clicks are no longer a necessary path to knowledge, but merely an optional route for verification and payment. The distribution power has shifted from editors who can write suspense to interfaces that can answer suspense.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
The hidden points will be snatched away by others' dialogue boxes.
Clickbait sells gaps, while models sell patches.
Clicks are not knowledge; they are just the past's more expensive way of asking.