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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
It's not clear to me why linking to AI-generated articles is far worse than, say, linking to a human-written article with tons of falsehoods. If AI is writing entire articles and confabulating facts that didn't happen, the problem is that a person linking to the article is assuming those facts are true when they aren't. Why does it matter if a bot wrote them or a human did?
The idea that the internet will soon be swamped in AI generated nonsense isn't convincing either, since Indians and Indonesians were always cheap and could reliably hash out SEO slop for pennies on the dollar. This led to a modest degradation of Google search results, but you could always still find the facts without too much trouble if you were aware of this.
AI writes slop cheaper, faster and better (in the "exploits SEO better" way) (perhaps better even than most whites).
What do you mean by this??
The grandparent comment is skeptical that AI will ruin the online media landscape, comparing AI to brown third-worlders (Indians and Indonesians), who have been writing slop for years:
Whether AI is better than (the more expensive) white writers is relevant to if AI writing will lead to a paradigm shift or if its just kind of the same old at a slightly different scale.
This is an extrapolation but you're explaining for the person who posted, who made no caveats about "more expensive" white writers, just wrote "most whites" as if we are to believe whites (defined how I do not know) are somehow more talented as a whole at writing than ___. This kind of presumptuous comment jars and I concur with @ThomasdelVasto that it shouldn't be just left unquestioned.
I would be shocked if the average white person was not better at writing convincing lies in European languages than the average Indian person, if for no other reason than because the average white person speaks a European first language. I'll give two more, though: Firstly because every signifier of Indian dialect is considered a red flag by people hunting for spam, so the Indian has to try not to trip over their dialect. Secondly because if you're writing copy then it matters whether you have a native command of the language and are immersed in the culture.
At least this is a rationale. I'd counter with the notion that the average person, white or not, probably can't write very well anyway. Twenty five years ago as a grad student I taught freshman composition, and the majority of my native-speaking students (almost entirely white) couldn't write their way out of a paper bag. Also dialects are legion even within the English language, and not as prominent in writing as speaking, in particularly phonological dialect. I can write "pen" and you read it in your own dialect, not realizing I'm imagining it pronounced "pin." Even lexically there aren't all that many terms in English used by native Indians that wouldn't be used by, say a British person* (e.g. "lift" for the proper term: elevator).
In any case I appreciate your having a stab at defending the position. I still think it's giving "whites" way too much generalized credit. Admittedly my experience with Indians has been with the highly educated.
*Let's say white British person.
I'm kind of sympathetic to Sunshine, there's a tendency in certain parts of India to write ridiculous lies in quite poor English.
See here: https://www.indiatoday.in/news-analysis/story/rafale-superior-to-chinese-j-20-a-comparison-of-the-two-fighter-jets-1705178-2020-07-28
Firstly, these sentences look like they were written by a child. Extremely awkward structuring and poor grammar.
Secondly, the content is extremely silly. 3rd generation engine in the J-20? The Russian engines they were using at the time in the J-20 were 4th gen and they were introducing better Chinese engines. A 3.5 generation aircraft would be something like a late-model Phantom, around the end of Vietnam, it's like saying China is 50 years behind. The Air Marshal is a fool, there was considerable schadenfreude in some parts of military-aviation twitter when export-grade Chinese J-10s wrecked India's Rafales.
Basic spellchecking failures too. Is one go? This is from the most popular Indian newspaper apparently. I have no doubt that much Indian journalism is better than this but it's easy to see a qualitative gap.
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