AI fake news complaining about how AI fake news is the death of real news

reedf1

Wait how many levels deep is this...

halestock

This is all depressing but I had to laugh at "Tolliver Chevrolet"

joenot443

This is a great read. It would appear https://theeditorial.news is "Under Construction" now. The articles themselves [1] were originally super creepy when you know the entire thing is made up. > Michelle Quaid is fifty-two years old, the mother of two grown children, and she began working at the Commercial-News in 1999 > Quaid wore a polo shirt with the paper's logo — a stylized 'C' — over her heart. She's not real! None of it is! Truly bizarre and unnerving. I'd love if we got a follow-up, eventually. Why only rural newspapers and South China Sea? [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20260629011021/https://theeditor...

franze

hypothesis: connecting an ai autoblogging script to Google Analytics / Google Search Console: 00 you seed some articles 10 wait for traffic 20 bot fetches GA / GSC 30 bot analysis what works what does not 40 instructed to create more of what works 50 more ai slop that works in search / social 60 Go To 10 aka a "positive" / unchallenged feedback loop content cost dismissible - cents per article

zerobees

I remarked a couple of times that the same thing crops up on HN. Many high-ranking blog posts about AI appear AI-generated, and the funny thing is that this holds true not only for pro-AI content, but also for anti-AI posts. Ultimately, a lot of topic-du-jour punditry is a hustle for clicks.

mwexler

Every time I read a piece from Nieman, it reminds me both of how much we've lost in journalism, but also that there's always hope to swing the pendulum back towards truth (well, more truthiness).

yodon

This reads like a nation state driven influence operation focused on feeding propaganda into LLM's and search engines (need to read towards the end to get to that part). It's reasonable to expect stories the real local press finds discussion worthy (because they are both false and relevant to the local press) are an effective way of using the local press to throw more link strength at their own site.

gchamonlive

It's becoming self aware, it's looking at itself and it's not liking what it's seeing. What if instead of the hollywoodean view of AI controlled dystopias, this is what we get instead, a big "nope, not gonna do it, sorry, and stop doing that btw, it bothers me". Sarcasm aside, I enjoy the irony.

zzzeek

got a family friend who keeps posting on Facebook big "Fight Datacenters!" photos / posters that are extremely obviously AI generated it's quite cringe, like a not-so-subtle troll on the people who share the image

spaceman_2020

I constantly wonder what is the societal benefits of AI It’s really hard to build a coherent pro-AI argument

haritha-j

It would be so meta if this article was AI generated.

tribal808

this is metalanguage

RetroTechie

Could we figure out ways to 'punish' the real people behind operations like this that flood the internet with fake crap? Name & shame. Contribute to enshittify the internet -> have your real-life reputation, finances, career prospects etc negatively affected. Same if it's nation states. As it stands, people could pull this crap 100s of times, while still profiting financially and look like operating a respectable ad agency / consultancy / whatever business.

rose-knuckle17

The death of real news, at least in the United States, was money and venture capital. AI is just one thing attempting to fill the gap. There hasn't been real news in America for a decade or more. It happened well before AI was on the scene. To me, there is no difference between AI fake news, podcasts as news, influencers "informing", or celebrity talking heads streaming commentary about current events. Its all garbage. Whether OpenAI computers make it up, or a podcaster presents their opinion as fact, the result is the same. We are all susceptible to being influenced by it as if it were news.

tempo101

Seems related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39288231 Paperwall: Chinese websites posing as local news outlets target global audiences (2024)

josefritzishere

AI is so terrible. We may never recover as a species from the damage.

karmakaze

The problem isn't AI. The problem has been the mass fan-out of information and unchecked regulation, people, or algorithms that determine it. AI only makes it worse.