By Charles Miller
Two weeks ago the column appearing in this space was written by ChatGPT, all except for the two paragraphs in which I explained the exercise. Prepare yourself for a lot more of this; not from me because I will continue to speak with my own voice, but there are already a growing number of news articles written entirely by Artificial Intelligence (AI). A report titled “Rise of the Newsbots: AI-Generated News Websites Proliferating Online” gives a whole new meaning to the term “fake news.”
The web site NewsGuard.com, not to be confused with newsguardtech.com, has been called a librarian for the internet. This five-year-old startup does not itself enjoy the best reputation for impartiality and trustworthiness even though it says it uses simple, apolitical journalistic criteria to rate other sites. The very nature of doing that is inherently questionable in itself; but in any case, NewsGuard says it has evaluated for more than 6,000 news websites, a number that might account for 95% of English online news sites. The aforementioned report claims to have identified 49 news and information sites, in seven languages, that appear to be entirely written by artificial intelligence software with little or no human oversight. The investigative methodology used by NewsGuard to reach their conclusions appears to be sound. A short aside: 27 years ago a roman à clef political novel “Primary Colors” written anonymously by columnist Joe Klein was a brief sensation until the author’s identity was unmasked. A quantitative stylometric analysis of the book’s writing style using the computer software available at the time soon correctly identified the author. That software has only gotten better since then, so rest assured that the writings of AI can be reliably identified, at least for now.
Most of these so-called content farms are low-quality websites that depend on AI to regurgitate news reporting found elsewhere online tailoring it to optimize advertising revenue. These sites are saturated with click-bait and advertisements because the obvious reason for these sites’ existence is that they are intended to generate ad revenue. A lot of advertising is placed around the web algorithmically so any site that can attract and keep a lot of traffic can generate significant revenue without regard to whether that site reports accurate information or not.
Traits common to most of these AI-generated websites is that they fail to disclose ownership; they churn out a high number of articles related to a variety of topics, sometimes hundreds of articles a day. The articles are content summarized or rewritten from other sources, almost never original reporting. Articles themselves often give away their AI origins by the use of short sentences, repetitive phrasing, and including AI responses such as “I am not capable of producing 1500 words…” that were not erased before publishing.
NewsGuard warns that a new generation of these content farms is on the way. As to the veracity of what I have written here? It has to be true as I read it on the internet.
Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant, a frequent visitor to San Miguel since 1981 and now practically a full-time resident. He may be contacted at 415-101-8528 or email FAQ8@SMAguru.com.
