Take A Spin Through the AI News Hellscape With Me
--
(from Searchblog)
This past Monday NewsGuard, a journalism rating platform that also analyzes and identifies AI-driven misinformation, announced it had identified hundreds of junk news sites powered by generative AI. The focus of NewsGuard’s release was how major brands were funding these spam sites through the indifference of programmatic advertising, but what I found interesting was how low that number was — 250 or so sites. I’d have guessed they’d find tens of thousands of these bottom feeders — but maybe I’m just too cynical about the state of news on the open web. I have a hunch my cynicism will be rewarded in due time, once the costs of AI decline and the inevitable economic incentives that have always driven hucksters kick in.
Given 250 is a manageable number for a mere mortal, I decided to ask the good folks at NewsGuard, where I’m an advisor, for a copy of their listings. Nothing like a tour through the post-apocalyptic hellscape of our AI future, right?
What I found was…disappointing. Most of the sites were beyond shoddy — barely literate, obviously automated, full of errors and content warnings, and utterly devoid of any sense of organizational structure. The most common message, upon clicking on a story link, was some variation of an OpenAI violation:
Not exactly a compelling headline. The next most common experience was this:
This of course is evidence that the scammers are rotating URLs to avoid blacklisting, unburdened of any concern about building audience loyalty. Beyond OpenAPI warnings and 404s, there’s the browser warnings that the site you’re about to visit is, well, seedy:
When you do get an actual news experiences, it becomes clear that these publishers have little interest in passing as…
