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I sounded the alarm when Nate Silver accidentally posted a 100% AI generated hoax article about Tim Walz, and nobody listened.
Now, our very own self_made_human, a generally intelligent and well regarded poster here, has succumbed to the exact same trap and posted a 100% AI generated hoax article about OpenAI and the UAE.
It appears that this problem is getting out of hand. In the past (let's say <2022) we had shitty reporting too, with low quality tabloids like daily mail, kotaku, vice, etc. posting poorly sourced sensationalist stories. But at least for those, they had human authors on the payroll whose job was to find sensationalist stories that were ideally true. And the tabloids could be sued for defamation if their false claims went too far, meaning that anything too spicy had to enough evidence, however thin, to cover ass for lawsuits.
Now we have 100 million Indians all trying to set up fake websites masquerading as "news" all hooked up to script kiddie scripts and ChatGPT, configured to pump out stories without the hand of a human even touching on the process. There was no human who even pressed a button to generate the fake article about Tim, just a cronjob that triggered the generate_todays_hoax() function like it does every day. And they simply need to put up lookalikes of real news sites (think scameras, white van speakers, etc.) and pay black hat SEOs to get their results into Google/Yahoo and get eyeballs on their absolute diarrhea of shit.
And yes, I admit that writers can use AI to help them be more productive and effective. But that absolutely isn't what's happening here. These scammers/hoaxers are only after clicks/money and have literally 0 care for the accuracy or reality of their bullshit at all.
You can clearly see that "business today" is AI generated fake USA today, "economic times" is fake The Economist / Financial Times, etc...I would like to humbly ask everyone here to please be aware that these grift websites (distinct from AI output in general, feel free to chat with ChatGPT on your own time) have zero truth value and should be regarded as about as trustworthy as those nigerian prince emails in your inbox. The people creating this slop are literally malicious hoaxers and scammers who only see you as moneybags and run this as a side gig from their main job of scamming grandmas in tech support scams.
Edit: It appears that business today does in fact publish real human written articles in addition to fake AI hoaxes, so uhhh your mileage may vary
In an ideal world, these kinds of serious missteps could lead to on the ground reporting being more valued. Put boots on the actual place, talk to actual people. It was already a problem that most "news" is just regurgitating press statements or "reaction" based takes like fake cable news style round table debates or monologing about what you should think about the press release. That was already pretty useless, and people have lamented for over a decade about the death of original reporting.
Shit, one of the reasons I first started watching Tim Pool was that he actually went places and did some original reporting. But that didn't cover the bills and instead he turned into a slop-tuber.
On the one hand I'd like to believe that AI makes this problem so much worse on the ground reporting comes back. On the other hand, even as I've thought more about this post as I write it...how much worse really does AI make the current press release/official lies information environment? More chaotic perhaps. But we're already almost a decade into the MSM's Fine People hoax and it still gets pushed and believed. I find it hard to make a distinction between major political institutions blatantly lying, and an LLM hallucinating information on the receiving end.
Only someone who largely consumes rolling news slop could say this. MSM produces reams of very high quality reporting every day, it's just that no-one cares about it because round-table shouting gets more clicks. If you actually think LLM generated false articles are no different to say, reading the Financial Times or New York Times you are simply wrong. Does the latter (and to a lesser extent the former) embed left-liberal assumptions in a lot of their reporting? Of course, and one should read anything with a critical eye. But they're still pretty good. If you don't want that just read the WSJ instead. These aren't as popular as the slop of course, but that's mostly the fault of the readers/viewers. If one read any of those publications daily or every few days, you would have a more complete and accurate understanding of politics, the economy etc. than probably 99% of the American public.
Maybe. Maybe not. Virtually every long form article I read I find out, sometimes years later, was a blatant lie. Or not? Sometime I never really find out.
Case in point, and something that never really leaves my mind. To this day I still don't know if this article in Bloomberg about China using their manufacturing to put backdoors in nearly every electronic device made there is true. It reads like it has tons of companies, if not on record, than with dozens of employees in them speaking of their experience in confidence. They appear to outline the actions numerous manufacturer's have taken to limit or mitigate this threat vector because they've been burned by it.
And yet in aftermath of that article, big splash though it made, virtually every entity named in it denied everything in it. I still have no clue if any of it was true, or they caved to pressure from China. I never heard of any real follow up reporting. And so I find myself almost less informed than if I'd read nothing at all. I have knowledge debt.
Edit: I'm going to double dip on this one actually.
Second example. Bitcoin. I tried for years to educate myself on bitcoin. It seemed interesting. Not one single news article about it told me anything. I was still reading Ars Technica back then, and even their "technical" reporting was lacking in any technical details and just came back to the same conclusion. Bitcoin is a scam. I remember this article in particular, which continues on that theme of seeming to impart negative knowledge. Like it's basically a blog of them setting up and running a bitcoin miner, but their stream of consciousness confusion about every step leaves you with an experience of a very unreliable narrator. And there is zero information what so ever about how any of it works beyond the most superficial ("it calculates hashes!")
Some time around 2017 I did my own research, ignoring everything "respectable" publishers were saying about bitcoin. I'm greatful every day since that I did, because I took literal decades off my savings goals by simply DCAing into bitcoin every month for 8 years. Even today the "respectable long form" articles about Bitcoin are probably 70-90% irrelevant smearing, ignorant half truths or malicious lies.
It kind of says it all that you're go-to example is a seven-year old story from a third-rate publication. This article was literally famous for the extravagance of the claims within it and the denials from relevant organisations. And you know who published many of those denials? Bloomberg. Perhaps something from the current decade and in an actual prestige publication might be nice - after all if 'virtually every longform article' you read turns out to be a lie it shouldn't be that hard to find reams of examples.
How about you give me a list of publications that would count to you, and how many examples you require.
That would take forever so to get an idea of what I mean I'll give some examples from a single subgroup, say foreign policy/international affairs (for no particular reason): Foreign Affairs, the Economist, ISW, World Today (Chatham House's magazine), the World Service, Brookings, the aforementioned FT and WSJ, Foreign Policy, JDW etc. etc.
This says more about your ability to recognize sources that regularly include slop than your ability to avoid sources that routinely include slop.
Foreign Affairs as an opener was a good joke, I will give you that.
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