AI-Generated Content Can Sometimes Slip Into Your Google News Feed (engadget.com) 37
Google News is sometimes boosting sites that rip-off other outlets by using AI to rapidly churn out content, 404 Media claims:
From the report: Google told 404 Media that although it tries to address spam on Google News, the company ultimately does not focus on whether a news article was written by an AI or a human, opening the way for more AI-generated content making its way onto Google News. The presence of AI-generated content on Google News signals two things: first, the black box nature of Google News, with entry into Google News' rankings in the first place an opaque, but apparently gameable, system. Second, is how Google may not be ready for moderating its News service in the age of consumer-access AI, where essentially anyone is able to churn out a mass of content with little to no regard for its quality or originality.
UPDATE: Engadget argues that "to find such stories required heavily manipulating the search results in Google News," noting that in the cited case, 404 Media's search parameters "are essentially set so that the original stories don't appear."
Engadget got this rebuke from Google. "Claiming that these sites were featured prominently in Google News is not accurate - the sites in question only appeared for artificially narrow queries, including queries that explicitly filtered out the date of an original article.
"We take the quality of our results extremely seriously and have clear policies against content created for the primary purpose of ranking well on News and we remove sites that violate it."
Engadget then wrote, "We apologize for overstating the issue and are including a slightly modified version of the original story that has been corrected for accuracy, and we've updated the headline to make it more accurate."
UPDATE: Engadget argues that "to find such stories required heavily manipulating the search results in Google News," noting that in the cited case, 404 Media's search parameters "are essentially set so that the original stories don't appear."
Engadget got this rebuke from Google. "Claiming that these sites were featured prominently in Google News is not accurate - the sites in question only appeared for artificially narrow queries, including queries that explicitly filtered out the date of an original article.
"We take the quality of our results extremely seriously and have clear policies against content created for the primary purpose of ranking well on News and we remove sites that violate it."
Engadget then wrote, "We apologize for overstating the issue and are including a slightly modified version of the original story that has been corrected for accuracy, and we've updated the headline to make it more accurate."
Not really. (Score:3)
It is the Skynet communicating by steganography.
Facts Be Damned (Score:5, Insightful)
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I don't understand why anyone expects any kind of vetting of information by the companies doing the reporting or the companies curating the content for delivery. Having any kind of integrity in the news is so 1995. The only information that matters today is the info that puts eyeballs on screens, facts be damned.
What Kurt Anderson refers to as "The Fantasy Industrial Complex" in his book Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire is picking up steam. Now, with computers hallucinating news stories for us rather than having silly humans hallucinate stories for us, we can pour fantasy into our brains much, MUCH faster! What a time to be alive.
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OR are AI garbage articles (Score:4, Insightful)
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It is a virtuous circle on the way down the drain.
Why would you get your news from Google? (Score:2)
Do you get your fresh veggies from McDonald's?
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Do you get your fresh veggies from McDonald's?
Yes. I also go to hookers for hugs.
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From her?
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/2... [cnbc.com]
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From her?
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/2... [cnbc.com]
I said hugs, not cuddles. Know your kinks, dude. This isn't even in the same wheelhouse.
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Sorry, I didn't mean to mis-kink you.
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Sorry, I didn't mean to mis-kink you.
SMH. These are the types of things people get canceled over, you know.
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We're on slashdot, we have already self canceled but I will be sure to check fetlife next time to make sure I never mis-kink anyone again. Please forgive my tremendous offensive and violence assault on your personhood.
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We're on slashdot, we have already self canceled but I will be sure to check fetlife next time to make sure I never mis-kink anyone again. Please forgive my tremendous offensive and violence assault on your personhood.
My therapist thanks you for your service.
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Hookers are cheaper than shrinks. You'd be surprised how many people hire hookers and don't actually have sex with them.
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Hookers are cheaper than shrinks. You'd be surprised how many people hire hookers and don't actually have sex with them.
Don't clutter up my sarcastic bullshit with facts!
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I heard years ago that ketchup and potatoes are veggies, so yeah.
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Yes, and so are the jars with starch and weak flour in my cupboard. I use them for yummy vegetable cakes all the time.
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Fake News is about to get really scary (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Fake News is about to get really scary (Score:4, Funny)
You don't need to use the 'service'. You can always still get your fake news hallucinations from Fox News and CNN.
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So an AI hallucinates some sensational clickbait, it's now going to get picked up by a million AI news farms and pushed by Google News. Uggg...this is scary and depressing.
All it's doing is speeding up the insanity of the last few years. It's so easy for some twat to tweet or facebook message some made-up nonsense, and if it's sensational enough, some "news" org will eventually stumble across the trending bullshit and act as if it's a real news story. AI will be able to do that much more quickly, and cover a LOT more territory.
The information age turned into the information garbage dump, and we're standing on the precipice of that garbage dump, watching a man on the other sid
no regard for its quality or originality (Score:1)
Capitalism, babe... whatever abuse the market will bear. If there's money to be made, it's all good
What's New Here? (Score:2)
Google News has always been bad. It's the only thing that makes MSN look even marginally acceptable - and MSN carries mostly bot-built news anyway. There's bad (or non-) editing, then there's stuff that's egregiously bad and obviously generated by something that is not human. MSN has more of the latter than the former these days (it's gotten worse over the last year or 2, perhaps as Bing's AI has taken over?), but Google has always been bad and has gotten worse to maintain its difference (perhaps reflecting
We are losing the AI war (Score:2)
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We need to go back to human curated portals like DMOZ was and the original Yahoo. They would have to be edited from secure terminals that verify that human hands have typed what goes on the site.
Unfortunately, the spammers slowly realized that dmoz was an excellent place to place spam.
Always a problem for alt-media (Score:5, Insightful)
In the "Web 2.0" era it was the worry that traditional news was being supplanted by random bloggers and now it's AI written articles.
While it's certainly easy and totally fair to point out the various issues with "mainstream" news outlets something alternative media outlets have failed to grapple with is that the mainstream outlets are still the vast majority who do "journalism" in that they have networks of reporters who are in locales or travel to locales to observe and write about events whereas the vast majority of alternative news is pundit-only commentary on the news reported by those actual journalists.
As much fun as it can be to rip on the NYT, WaPo, The New Yorker, The Atlantic and such these are still the outlets that have the will and means to say, pay a few reporters for months or even years to fully work on a story knowing full well it won't see dividends until then.
It's the journalism model of investing and most sites only want to be day traders. While there are plenty of cases of the mainstream sites employing AI it sure seems like the vast majority of "AI churn clickbait" is coming from the alternative media and I think it's something that has to be grasped with if we don't want to constantly be beholden to the traditional media outlets.
I mean even when an alt news site makes an honest attempt at "real" journalism , a perfect example was Buzzfeed News, it is a struggle and chances it's shut down to focus on more click churn.
AI is just exacerbating the problem of how do we fund real honest journalism because we can kvetch about bias all we want but if low effort bias is what get's eyeballs and rewarded, what do we expect these outlets to focus on?
Fantastic news (Score:2)
Fantastic news!
Seriously, this just further emphasizes Google's slide into irrelevancy. Over the past 5 or so years, Google search results have gone from useful to borderline useful and frustrating, to completely useless ad propagated placement.
Considering how far journalism has fallen in the last several years in general, and specifically since they started censoring material on political basis, it's just one more point of irrelevancy against the monopoly.
Since AI isn't going to do investigative reporting (Score:5, Insightful)
it's just going to have to synthesize stories by scraping other sources. How are you going to prevent it from scraping other AI generated content and getting in some kind of endless feedback loop, reporting unverified or fake news?
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Hmm, just thinking about this, AI could do some investigative reporting.
Feed an AI bot much of the video feeds of London and have it describe anomalies.
I don't know what percentage of London's surveillance state cameras have their feed accessible, but it could probably report car accidents and street crimes. It might even be able to do public interest stories about new food trucks and businesses.
It would be interesting to see if it could verify quarterly reports of publicly traded companies. An AI could p
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Bet humans from the "we pay you to shit out stories not to get scooped" department can repackage unverified stories just fine. AI could do some basic verification much faster and cheaper than humans, so at least wouldn't get scooped.
Terrifying how popular it is (Score:2)
https://www.similarweb.com/web... [similarweb.com]
I've never used it so I figured it was another of Google's zombie projects. Ain't so. 381m monthly active users is very respectable.
Now it's a case of does the AI crap kill it or make it even more popular. I fear it will be the latter.
Time for a signed content registry. (Score:2)
I think its inevitable that one way or another we are going to end up with something like a dns registry for people where we each register our public keys and the internet will be divided into signed content and unsigned content. Really should have happened a long time ago. Without any kind of reputation attached to it, anonymous content is just about trolling for eyeballs and should be treated as such.