A recent report by NewsGuard, a news ratings group, found that many news sites are using AI-powered chatbots to generate their stories.
As part of a new study, NewsGuard has reportedly identified nearly 50 news sites specializing in various fields, which use artificial intelligence on a daily basis to generate entire articles on the chain. These would be written in various languages, including English, Chinese, French, Portuguese, Thai, Tagalog and Czech.
Many of these sites appear to be content farms run by anonymous sources that produce articles for the sole purpose of reaping ad revenue. This practice has been widely democratized this year, while AI-powered tools were becoming widely used by internet users.
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AI-generated articles are problematic
The use of AI chatbots raises serious questions about how the technology is able to generate content, since sometimes tools such as ChatGPT invent information from scratch. Gordon Crovitz, co-chief executive of NewsGuard, said the group’s report showed companies like OpenAI and Google should be careful to train their models so they don’t fabricate information. This could soon be a big problem, since Wikipedia itself plans to use AI to create thousands of articles.
OpenAI said it uses a combination of human reviewers and automated systems to identify and address misuse of its model, including issuing warnings or, in severe cases, banning users. For its part, Google added that it evaluates content according to its existing editing rules and that using automation to generate content with the aim of manipulating the ranking in search results violates the rules. of the company regarding spam.
In the case of the 49 sites identified by NewsGuard, none of them reveal that they are powered by conversational tools, which can generate detailed texts from simple user requests. However, a handful of sites have generated revenue by doing “guest posting” type advertising, which allows Internet users to order mentions of their business on websites, against payment, in order to improve their ranking in search engines. Others make money by running programmatic ads, i.e. advertising space on the sites is bought and sold automatically using algorithms.
