What are Newsbots? Identified 49 sites that launch news with artificial intelligence
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NewsGuard, the association that evaluates the reliability of news sites around the world has sounded an alarm about a new generation of news sites that use artificial intelligence. More specifically, these are ‘content farms’, i.e. low-quality websites spread all over the world that churn out large quantities of clickbait articles to maximize their advertising revenue. In April 2023, it identified 49 sites in seven languages (Czech, Chinese, French, English, Portuguese, Tagalog and Thai) that looked like typical news sites but appear to have been wholly or largely generated by AI-powered language patterns designed to mimic human communication. The sites, which often don’t identify their owners, produce a large amount of content on a variety of topics, including politics, health, entertainment, finance and technology. Some of these sites publish hundreds of articles a day. «Certain articles – writes NewsGuard – promote false narratives. Almost all content is written using banal language and repetitive sentences, hallmarks of texts produced by artificial intelligence».
How are newsbots made?
According to the association, many of these sites are full of advertisements, “which suggests that they were probably designed to generate revenue from programmatic ads, which are placed through algorithms and finance a large part of the world’s media (exactly what the first generation of internet content farms, run by humans, was conceived). Typically, the 49 AI-powered sites identified by NewsGuard have seemingly innocuous and generic names, which might suggest that these sites are operated by established publishers, such as Biz Breaking News, News Live 79, Daily Business Post, and Market News Reports.
AI-generated articles often summarize or rewrite content produced by other sources. For example, the primary activity of BestBudgetUSA.com, a site that does not disclose ownership information and was registered anonymously in May 2022, appears to be summarizing or rewriting CNN articles.
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