News Sites Use AI for Content

Newsguard has published a report on the increasing use of AT software in writing news content.

The report identified 49 websites in seven languages that appear to be entirely or mostly generated by artificial intelligence language models designed to mimic human communication.

The researchers’ concern is that these AI tools become more widespread, which “threatens to lower the quality of the information ecosystem by saturating it with clickbait and low-quality articles” and make it difficult for people to distinguish between a human-written text and AI-generated content.

Completely AI-generated content can be inaccurate or promote misinformation. That can be dangerous if it concerns bad advice on health or financial matters. Since AI content is generated by a machine, Some consumers might assume it is more objective than content created by humans, but that can be wrong, experts say, as there’s always a bias in the AI platforms embedded by their programmers.

Poor AI content could be harmful to advertisers and for brand safety.

A tricky point can be that some of these news sites might be using Google’s AdSense platform to generate revenue and Google’s AI Bard to create content.

There’s another expert opinion that it’s not that important whether humans or AI software create the content as the content is already incorrectly translated or incorrectly generalized. Moreover, using AI to create content allows to reduce costs.

But still the problems are that websites use AI fail to disclose ownership or control and advance false data. There are guardrails, but a lot of these AI tools can be “easily weaponized to produce misinformation”.

Identifying content created by AI software can be difficult without using specialized tools like GPTZero. But the report noted that all 49 sites identified by NewsGuard had published at least one article containing error messages commonly found in AI-generated texts.

Concerns about the abuse of AI have made it a possible target of government regulation. We need to have a broader discussion about how AI is having an impact on all aspects of civil society, experts assume.