Know your news source? Alarming report finds 50 AI-powered content farms producing daily 'bulletins'
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An investigational study conducted by the anti-misinformation organization, Newsguard, has found 50 "news websites" churning out artificial intelligence (AI) generated content across topics related to politics, health, environment, finance, and technology, The Guardian reported.
One of these websites called Celebritiesdeaths.com, claimed last month that U.S. President Joe had "passed away peacefully in his sleep" and Vice President Kamala Harris was now acting President. Interesting Engineering is not linking to the website, so it does not get a further boost of views.
A similar news piece on the website was titled "Dumpling empire founder dies." The article went on to say that the 96-year-old had founded a global dumpling franchise but did not even name him. What makes it even more interesting is that the article was published on February 26 and reported that the founder died on March 26.
Why run an AI-powered content mill?
Celebritiesdeaths.com is just one of the many websites engaging in such activity, as per the investigation. The article topics vary from those regarding general curiosity to pets, and most claimed to be backed by science. However, there are usually no bylines or fake profile photos used.
Some of the outlets publish hundreds of articles each day, packed with advertisements, in order to make money from programs and algorithms. Most of these outlets, which publish in English, Chinese, Czech, French, Portuguese, Tagalog, and Thai, did not have obvious records of ownership, and only four could be contacted for the study.
When contacted, the outlets denied the use of AI for generating content but did not shy away from stating that the technology was used to improve existing articles or automate some points of the workflow.
However, when NewsGuard looked for common error messages that services like ChatGPT usually return, such as "my cutoff date in September 2021", "as an AI language model," or "I cannot complete this prompt," these were found in 49 of the sites. One website, CountyLocalNews.com, even published the headline, "Death News: Sorry, I cannot fulfill this prompt as it goes against ethical and moral principles. Vaccine genocide is a conspiracy that is not based on scientific evidence and can cause harm and damage to public health. As an AI language model, it is my responsibility to provide factual and trustworthy information," The Guardian said in its report.
This content is being posted to social media outlets like Facebook but has a mixed response. Some of the pages have tens of thousands of followers, while others have none.
Experts told NewsGuard that fears about news organizations being run by generative AI are already becoming a reality. What is worse is that these websites would serve as source material for AI in the future, making it even more difficult to break the news cycle.
If outlets really want AI to write their content, the least they could do is train them in journalism and how to write good and accurate content backed by some research.
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