AI blamed for Surfer magazine’s latest faux pas that has left surf fans in stitches

"Sharks have horns now?"

Earlier this year, and following a series of damning exposés by Chas Smith, here, here, here, here and here, Jen See wrote of the terrible fate befalling writers at Surfer mag.

“You picture yourself in Hawaii watching beautifully tanned surfers ride giant blue waves. You see yourself at San Onofre, where you’ve somehow instantly become a graceful and accomplished longboarder.

“Instead, your job looks nothing like any of these things. Using AI tools, you scrape social media for trending news. Then using another tool, trained on Surfer’s legacy digital content, you produce a story. You do that many times each day.

“You never talk to another person, never go anywhere, never learn to noseride at San-O. Your job is to punch the buttons to create the content that feeds the search engine bots that crawl the internet all day, every day. Eventually, it would have to start to feel like you were becoming one of the bots, yourself.”

Yesterday, Surfer published a story about a middle-aged man bitten on the ankle by what was, possibly, a shark with the headline “Shark gores windsurfer in Western Australia on Christmas Eve.”

“This is a developing story,” the writer gravely announced.

Surf fans, who will rarely suffer a fool and who are wildly overrepresented in the field of pedantry, were unimpressed, pointing out the thoughtless use of the adjective “gored” in the headline.

“Gores”??? They have horns now? The dude was bitten on the ankle and that’s the headline? Surfer mag has jumped the shark.

“(Gored, definition) Blood that has been shed, especially as a result of violence.”

“Gored implies horns in the united states.”

“And the rest of the English speaking world…”

Maybe it was a bull shark?

“Sharks have horns in Australia? Gored? Seriously?”

“Since when do sharks have horns?”

“If the shark gored, it must have been extremely hоrnее.”

“Gored? Sharks have horns? Tusks maybe? Get someone educated to write the header.”

“Gored? Must have been a bull shark.”

“Sharks don’t ‘gore’, media…”

“to wound (a person or another animal) with a horn or tusk”

“Is whoever wrote this not versed in the english language? Sharks bite, they don’t gore.”

“I gored my wife last night.”

“GORED !!????….must have been a Narwhal whale that crossbred with a shark, therefore it must have been a narwhal shark.”

For the layman,

“If you stabbed someone with a sword, you gored them. An animal with sharp horns, like a bull, can gore a person to death. Gore is also blood that’s clotting in a wound.”

To wit, in the tabloid age  sharks maul, bulls gore.