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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 the end this will force people to blindly trust preferred sources in a way we haven’t done in 120+ years.
Since the popularization of the camera, major hoaxes have required escalating amounts of effort to reliably and persuasively fake audiovisual evidence.
Of course, they still existed. Stalin’s erstwhile colleagues were airbrushed. The BBC convinced the British public that spaghetti grew on trees. But until recently, hardcore OSINT types on Twitter could pretty reliably prove quite quickly whether something was real or fake.
Now, that’s increasingly no longer the case. We are moving back to the days when you decided to believe the foreign correspondent of your preferred newspaper simply because you believe him, and his reporting, with no further evidence required, necessary, or even available.
I think honestly the advent of AI contest is going to force the issue of epistemology more so than “trusted sources”. Things like knowing statistics and logic and using the information to make predictions is much more important than “it comes from the NYT so it’s true.
The conceit of Liberalism is that the average man has the time or inclination to invest into this level of reasoning. I think you'll be disappointed if you still think they will.
The brand of autist that hangs around in these parts might well put in the effort. Most people won't. They may or may not end up trusting the NYT. They could also revert to base superstition because the NYT is not trustworthy.
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