Here come the fake AI-generated “news” sites

The fact that we’re heading into another presidential election cycle, we all need to be very wary of “news sites” popping up on the internet. There’s an organization called “NewsGuard” which calls itself “The internet Trust Tool”. To give you some idea of its pedigree, it has Co-CEOs and Co-Editors-In-Chief Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz, both are attorneys, veteran journalists and news entrepreneurs. Steven Brill founded The American Lawyer magazine, the Court TV cable channel, he also founded the Yale Journalism Initiative. Gordon Crovitz is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Chicago. He received a law degree as a Rhodes Scholar from Wadham College of Oxford University and a law degree from Yale. He was publisher of The Wall Street Journal and also served as executive vice-president of Dow Jones. Together, they have supervised thousands of journalists around the world.

It’s pretty clear that they are not a pair of newbies and NewsGuard, which they co-founded in 2018, is not some scammy fly-by-night operation. The title of their recent posting, was: “Rise of the Newsbots: AI-Generated News Websites Proliferating Online.” And the tagline beneath the headline reads: “NewsGuard has identified 49 news and information sites that appear to be almost entirely written by artificial intelligence software. A new generation of content farms is on the way.”

The fact that the Internet is fundamentally bot-compatible represents a real problem. One of the primary reasons we have such a problem with spam is that eMail is also 100% bot-compatible. Sadly, it appears that the value of Internet for news and journalism is about to get a whole lot worse.

We all need to understand and appreciate what’s going on around us, and because I suspect that it will give every listener pause when they contemplate what is already happening to the Internet.

Here’s what their recent research has revealed:
NewsGuard has found that artificial intelligence tools are now being used to populate so-called content farms, referring to low-quality websites around the world that churn out vast amounts of clickbait articles to optimize advertising revenue.

Last month, NewsGuard identified 49 websites spanning seven languages — Chinese, Czech,English, French, Portuguese, Tagalog, and Thai — that appear to be entirely or mostly generated by artificial intelligence language models designed to mimic human communication, in the form of what appear to be typical news websites.

The websites, which often fail to disclose ownership or control, produce a high volume of content related to a variety of topics, including politics, health, entertainment, finance, and technology. Some publish hundreds of articles a day. Some of the content advances false narratives. Nearly all of the content features bland language and repetitive phrases, hallmarks of artificial intelligence.

Many of the sites are saturated with advertisements, indicating that they were likely designed to generate revenue from programmatic ads, ads placed algorithmically across the web which finance much of the world’s media, much as the internet’s first generation of content farms, operated by humans, were built to do.
In short, as numerous and more powerful AI tools have been unveiled and made available to the public in recent months, concerns that they could be used to conjure up entire news organizations — once the subject of speculation by media scholars — have now become a reality.

Last month, NewsGuard sent emails to the 29 sites in the analysis that listed contact information, and two confirmed that they have used AI. Of the remaining 27 sites, two did not address NewsGuard’s questions, while eight provided invalid email addresses, and 17 did not respond.

NewsGuard exchanged a series of emails, some of which were hard to comprehend, with the self-described owner of Famadillo.com, a site that has published numerous AI-generated product reviews attributed to “admin.” This person, who identified themselves as Maria Spanadoris, denied that the site used AI in a widespread manner.

Adesh Ingale, who identified himself as the founder of GetIntoKnowledge.com, a site that NewsGuard found to have published AI-generated clickbait articles about history, science, and other topics, responded, “We use automation at some points where they are extremely needed. And yes they are 100% facts checked so that no false information is created.

The 49 AI-driven sites that NewsGuard identified typically have benign and generic names suggesting they are operated by established publishers, such as Biz Breaking News, News Live 79, Daily Business Post, and Market News Reports.

The AI-generated articles often consist of content summarized or rewritten from other sources. For example, BestBudgetUSA.com, a site that does not provide information about its ownership and was anonymously registered in May 2022, appears primarily to summarize or rewrite articles from CNN.

These fake news sites are only going to get better and become increasingly difficult to spot. Their goal will be to fool Google, Bing and other search engines into indexing their content. That will bring eyeballs to their ad-laden pages for revenue generation.

As AI generated information becomes harder to identify, perhaps we should all visit this website when we want to validate information found on the internet.
https://www.newsguardtech.com/special-reports/ai-tracking-center/

Special Thanks to the Security Now podcast and The Verge for helping us stay ahead of these challenges.