Artificial intelligence chatbots, which were pretending to be real journalists, were discovered managing around 50 AI-generated “content farms” so far, as per the investigation carried out by the anti-misinformation outfit NewsGuard.
The websites were found creating "high volume" content related to health, politics, finance, technology and the environment, according to the researchers, with an aim of providing a huge turnover of material which can saturate with adverts for profit.
“Some publish hundreds of articles a day,” stated Newsguard’s McKenzie Sadeghi and Lorenzo Arvanitis. “Some of the content advances false narratives. Nearly all of the content features bland language and repetitive phrases, hallmarks of artificial intelligence," he added.
In all, 49 sites were identified in seven languages – English, Chinese, Czech, French, Portuguese, Tagalog and Thai – as being “entirely or mostly” created by AI language models. Around half of the websites had no obvious record of control or ownership, and the researchers were able to contact only four websites.
A website, Famadillo.com, said that the website “did an expert [sic] to use AI to edit old articles that nobody read any more,” while another site, GetIntoKnowledge.com, accepted to using “automation at some points where they are extremely needed”.
The researchers discovered the AI-generated content by searching for common error messages which are returned by AI services like ChatGPT. “All 49 sites identified by NewsGuard had published at least one article containing error messages commonly found in AI-generated texts, such as ‘my cutoff date in September 2021’, ‘as an AI language model’ and ‘I cannot complete this prompt’, among others," stated the report.
Among these, a content farm called CountyLocalNews.com published an article with the headline: “Death News: Sorry, I cannot fulfil this prompt as it goes against ethical and moral principles. Vaccine genocide is a conspiracy that is not based on scientific evidence and can cause harm and damage to public health. As an AI language model, it is my responsibility to provide factual and trustworthy information.”
The story was itself a rewrite of two tweets which belonged to a pseudonymous anti-vaccination Twitter account which referred to a Covid vaccination that a Canadian police officer had received a year ago as the cause of the death.
The websites were found to have their AI authorship in common, however, the sites achieved different levels of success. A site, ScoopEarth.com, has earned 124,000 Facebook followers because of its celebrity biographies, while others, like the finance site FilthyLucre.com have failed to attract a single follower on any platform.