Nearly 50 AI-generated content farms operated by “journalist” chatbots

An anti-misinformation outfit, NewsGuard, has discovered nearly 50 “AI content farms” that publish low-quality content and impersonate journalists. The agency stated the proliferation of chatbots is responsible for the creation of false narratives and misinformation for revenue generation. 

NewsGuard analysts identified forty-nine AI-generated websites through keyword searches on Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo for phrases commonly produced by AI Chatbots. According to the report, these websites span Chinese, Czech, English, French, Portuguese, Tagalog, and Thai, which appear primarily generated by AI language models designed to mimic human communication.

The websites often need to disclose ownership or control, and the researchers could contact only four. They also often have generic names, suggesting established publishers operate them. Additionally, they are an admin and an editor, or have no bylines. Some feature fake author profiles. The websites produce a high volume of content on various topics, including politics, health, entertainment, finance, and technology. Some publish hundreds of articles a day. 

Many of the websites have advertisements, indicating that their design was likely to generate revenue from programmatic adverts — adverts placed algorithmically across the web and finance much of the world’s media.

Most web content produced by AI-program may seem genuine to an unassuming reader, who would easily assume a human writes them. However, most of the articles often featured bland language and repeated phrases. Furthermore, all the forty-nine websites identified by NewsGuard had published at least one article containing error messages commonly found in AI-generated texts.

Some sites also include ‘About’ and ‘Privacy Policy’ pages that were algorithmically produced by tools that generated customizable disclaimers and copyright notices but were not fully completed. 

Photo credit: Lee Campbell(U splash)