9 ms·

AI slop is already invading Oregon's local journalism

210 points by pseudolus 2y ago

throwaway122024 2y ago
[dead]
binarymax 2y ago
I more or less expect this to be how things are on the internet these days. Very little authenticity, all just a scam for clicks and ad revenue. I don’t even bother with content marketing anymore because there’s no point. It’s just a sad sad future we fell into due to everything being about clicks and gaming the system.
justlikereddit 2y ago
[flagged]
- danudey 2y ago
  If journalists want less slop media then maybe they shouldn't go around having their identities stolen by scammers producing fraudulent articles pretending to be from a legitimate news source. What you're complaining about is that real journalism costs money to produce, but fake journalism via AI is vastly cheaper, so really it's the journalists' fault for having to pay bills and eat food. The journalists "perform worse" because they have to get paid, and because they're writing articles to be truthful and enlightening rather than appeal to SEO algorithms. What a disgusting and useless take.
- seattle_spring 2y ago
  Odd accusation. OPB may have some bias, but it's definitely not "AI slop" territory.
robtaylor 2y ago
To those, like throwaway on this thread, who say " Give it 5 years and this "AI slop" will write better than your best trained journalist. Get over it." How does AI attend meetings, ask questions of local officials or bodies, provide in-person reports and original fact based copy? AI can hoover all that up and rewrite and expand, but surely there will be a need to have boots-on-the-ground? If so, who pays? I am already seeing AI giants using local media copy in output with $0 paid for the knowledge and information.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  Microphone / camera / speaker in meeting? I'm sympathetic to the way you're looking at this, but imho the end state will be similar to most other automating technologies. The simplest, lowest-effort work will be automated (sitting and transcribing), and humans will reapply themselves to (more productively) do higher-level tasks. I'm sure a local beat reporter would be thrilled if they could get notes from all the meetings yesterday.
  - axus 2y ago
    And asking questions? Will the AI have hallways conversations, historical context and relationships with previous office-holders that inform the questions? A reporter is supposed to care about accuracy, an AI only cares about generating words that make sense and fit the page. I can see why the owners align with the AI more than the reporter.
    - add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
      We're living in an unfortunate time when people have been trained so thoroughly to hate institutions that they've lost basic understanding of how those institutions work. And how they still serve us, despite their flaws. The institutions have become nothing more than abstractions that can be rhetorically written off and replaced by either outsiders from the establishment, or in this case algorithms.
      - bluGill 2y ago
        don't forget the people who try to exploit the institution for their own gain. Thus ensuring institutions are bogged down in bureaucracy to prevent that.
    - ethbr1 2y ago
      Why not? I'm not sure SOTA is at the most insightful questions yet, but those are rarely the ones that get answered at briefings anyway. Point being that it's not "human-or" but "human-and". A local reporter who spends their night reading summaries of the day's meetings, diving into the raw recordings where needed, and then writing prompts for tomorrow's agents doesn't sound like a terrible future. As the quip about local journalism goes: a lot of it is sitting around at meeting #324, to pick up the one interesting tidbit. With local news having been apple-cored revenue-wise by social media, that's now generally just not being done outside of major metros. So I'd welcome anything that promotes more transparency and local reporting!
threeseed 2y ago
This isn't new. News Corp has been 'innovating' since 2023: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/aug/01/news-corp-ai-chat-gpt-stories https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/aug/01/news-corp-ai-c...
- lazystar 2y ago
  this is new. please see my comment above on the carpenter media group.
bgun 2y ago
This is straight-up identity theft, and likely breaks any number of consumer protection laws. I don't necessarily mind AI being used to write articles that are otherwise factual, but stealing a reporter's name to write about places he's never been and things he's never done, restaurants he's never eaten at - strikes me as a dangerous gamble for companies playing in the slim margins of advertising-based journalism. AI may write a great restaurant review or local experience story, but the lack of fact-checking is disturbing and I hope the corporations behind these tools can be held to account when they inevitably harm someone with egregious misinformation.
- nonrandomstring 2y ago
  > inevitably harm someone with egregious misinformation Isn't the deception itself a sufficiently egregious harm?
  - throw646577 2y ago
    In general, if you harm everyone in an instinctively obvious but factually hard-to-demonstrate way, there aren't any meaningful penalties. The situations in which "we all suffer" are the ones where people get away with it, eh? Personifying it this way -- finding someone who is clearly injured -- is the only way to make progress.
    - nonrandomstring 2y ago
      "A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic." -- Stalin Thanks for replying. I wonder, although, in US America for example, it requires "demonstrable harm" to bring lawsuits etc, there is an enduring concept of "the fabric of society" [0] in many legal traditions. (I think it is likely examined by J.S. Mill) and even appears in US congressional commentary [1]. In a digital context there is some mileage here [3]. Might we see a successful lawsuit on the merits that the "mere existence" of some technologies is an affront. "Artificial Intelligence" is after all "artifice" artifice: a clever trick, guile, deception, cunning, a skillful or artful contrivance [0] https://societyforpeace.com/fabric-of-society-meaning/ https://societyforpeace.com/fabric-of-society-meaning/ [1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/10278 https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/1027... [3] https://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/sulr/vol27/iss1/2/ https://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/sulr/vol27/iss1/2/
ambicapter 2y ago
Another reason to put as little as possible on the internet; if you gain any measure of credibility, you now need to safeguard your identity, urls, etc. FOREVER lest someone steal your identity and launder their reputation through it. What a world we've created.
- vouaobrasil 2y ago
  Isn't it a shame though that we created something like the internet that could have been a good thing and now it's a nightmare like this due to AI? It seems illogical that the same people who theoretically love the internet also created the technology that will make it a nightmare, but I guess money does that to them.
  - fennecbutt 2y ago
    Not really. It's not ai fault that humans use for bad. It's not Internet fault that people use it to buy/sell illegal drugs. Same same.
randcraw 2y ago
Excellent and fascinating article. The only way this will end is intervention by federal law enforcement, perhaps by formally proscripting DNS servers to route visitors to a law enforcement site that reports that IP address as a criminal enterprise, and ideally, also providing a link to info on the particular legal hold that was placed on this fraudster so visitors will be informed and can investigate further if they desire. I continue to be astonished at how disengaged federal law enforcement continues to be at today's myriad internet-based crimes. If we need more staff to investigate and prosecute the volume of net-based crime, then the FBI / FCC / FTC should hire more people dammit. What's the argument against doing this, I wonder?
- krunck 2y ago
  Avoid the FBI/FCC/FTC expenditures and instead fund high school classes in media literacy and analysis.
lazystar 2y ago
ah, another thread on the Carpenter Media Group. previous related discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42212650#42249985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42212650#42249985 this "carpenter group" have gone on a spree in 2024 of snatching up smaller news orgs, and cutting 50% of the staff. seems like a pretty big gamble on AI. > Carpenter Media Group announced earlier this month it had acquired another group of newspapers, Pamplin Media Group, in Oregon. The company now owns and manages 180 newspapers in the United States and Canada. > “We are committed to Everett, The Herald and all who have a stake in its success,” Chairman Todd Carpenter said. “We have deep sympathy for those affected by these changes and will work hard with each of them to see they are well-compensated through a transition period that helps them move forward in a positive way. “Our responsibility to the community and our readers requires us to make difficult business decisions, and then invest in and organize our team to move forward to produce a product that continues to improve and serve. Our track record in this process is good." https://www.heraldnet.com/news/this-breaks-my-heart-roughly- https://www.heraldnet.com/news/this-breaks-my-heart-roughly-...
- cgh 2y ago
  The article mentions the bad guys in this case are Chinese scammers that acquired the newspaper's domain and filled the site with lightly-rewritten articles from legitimate sources.
neilv 2y ago
Seems worse than garden-variety AI slop. Seems loaded with fraud, defamation, and civic sabotage. Hopefully, lawyers, law enforcement, and perhaps diplomats will rip apart the perpetrators.
- lazystar 2y ago
  the perpetrator is the "carpenter media group" conglomerate, please see my earlier comment
neom 2y ago
Also now featuring AI chat linking to AI articles in line! AI article is content marketing ad. https://s.h4x.club/RBubww78 https://s.h4x.club/RBubww78
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
runjake 2y ago
Key point: Don't blame AI. It was slop on these[1] sites before it became AI slop. Before AI came along, the local Oregon "news" sites were acquired by national/multinational media companies. They fired the existing writer staff and hired the cheapest people they could to write stories. Articles were riddled with spelling and grammatical errors and the stories did not ask or answer some of the basic questions about the topic of the story. You feed garbage into an AI and you're going to get garbage out. I don't expect it to improve in this market because their goal is to sell ads and get eyeballs. 1. Sinclair, Allen Media, etc
- idatum 2y ago
  I think this trend is going to get worse and we haven't hit bottom. But the bounce from bottom may be we seek out actual journalists and a new (again) market emerges for human generated, quality content. And I hope this starts at the local level. We need "local papers".
- intended 2y ago
  How is this the takeaway? The newspaper went under. Then the address got bought by scammers. Did I misread the article?
  - runjake 2y ago
    A majority of the article is about large media groups (including the ones I mentioned) buying up local news websites and filling them with low quality, AI-written stories. My comment is about the exact same media groups and geographic areas discussed in the article.
Aloisius 2y ago
Maybe it's time to start poisoning the well. Use AI to generate fake articles for real news sites and let the AI bots crawl them. How much returning traffic is a news plagiarism site going to get if they start reporting on Bigfoot getting into an accident on I-82 near Olympus Mons?

210 points by pseudolus 2y ago

throwaway122024 2y ago

[dead]

I more or less expect this to be how things are on the internet these days. Very little authenticity, all just a scam for clicks and ad revenue. I don’t even bother with content marketing anymore because there’s no point. It’s just a sad sad future we fell into due to everything being about clicks and gaming the system.

justlikereddit 2y ago

[flagged]

danudey 2y ago
If journalists want less slop media then maybe they shouldn't go around having their identities stolen by scammers producing fraudulent articles pretending to be from a legitimate news source. What you're complaining about is that real journalism costs money to produce, but fake journalism via AI is vastly cheaper, so really it's the journalists' fault for having to pay bills and eat food. The journalists "perform worse" because they have to get paid, and because they're writing articles to be truthful and enlightening rather than appeal to SEO algorithms. What a disgusting and useless take.
seattle_spring 2y ago
Odd accusation. OPB may have some bias, but it's definitely not "AI slop" territory.

robtaylor 2y ago

To those, like throwaway on this thread, who say " Give it 5 years and this "AI slop" will write better than your best trained journalist. Get over it." How does AI attend meetings, ask questions of local officials or bodies, provide in-person reports and original fact based copy? AI can hoover all that up and rewrite and expand, but surely there will be a need to have boots-on-the-ground? If so, who pays? I am already seeing AI giants using local media copy in output with $0 paid for the knowledge and information.

ethbr1 2y ago
Microphone / camera / speaker in meeting? I'm sympathetic to the way you're looking at this, but imho the end state will be similar to most other automating technologies. The simplest, lowest-effort work will be automated (sitting and transcribing), and humans will reapply themselves to (more productively) do higher-level tasks. I'm sure a local beat reporter would be thrilled if they could get notes from all the meetings yesterday.
- axus 2y ago
  And asking questions? Will the AI have hallways conversations, historical context and relationships with previous office-holders that inform the questions? A reporter is supposed to care about accuracy, an AI only cares about generating words that make sense and fit the page. I can see why the owners align with the AI more than the reporter.
  - add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
    We're living in an unfortunate time when people have been trained so thoroughly to hate institutions that they've lost basic understanding of how those institutions work. And how they still serve us, despite their flaws. The institutions have become nothing more than abstractions that can be rhetorically written off and replaced by either outsiders from the establishment, or in this case algorithms.
    - bluGill 2y ago
      don't forget the people who try to exploit the institution for their own gain. Thus ensuring institutions are bogged down in bureaucracy to prevent that.
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    Why not? I'm not sure SOTA is at the most insightful questions yet, but those are rarely the ones that get answered at briefings anyway. Point being that it's not "human-or" but "human-and". A local reporter who spends their night reading summaries of the day's meetings, diving into the raw recordings where needed, and then writing prompts for tomorrow's agents doesn't sound like a terrible future. As the quip about local journalism goes: a lot of it is sitting around at meeting #324, to pick up the one interesting tidbit. With local news having been apple-cored revenue-wise by social media, that's now generally just not being done outside of major metros. So I'd welcome anything that promotes more transparency and local reporting!

threeseed 2y ago

This isn't new. News Corp has been 'innovating' since 2023: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/aug/01/news-corp-ai-chat-gpt-stories https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/aug/01/news-corp-ai-c...

lazystar 2y ago
this is new. please see my comment above on the carpenter media group.

bgun 2y ago

This is straight-up identity theft, and likely breaks any number of consumer protection laws. I don't necessarily mind AI being used to write articles that are otherwise factual, but stealing a reporter's name to write about places he's never been and things he's never done, restaurants he's never eaten at - strikes me as a dangerous gamble for companies playing in the slim margins of advertising-based journalism. AI may write a great restaurant review or local experience story, but the lack of fact-checking is disturbing and I hope the corporations behind these tools can be held to account when they inevitably harm someone with egregious misinformation.

nonrandomstring 2y ago
> inevitably harm someone with egregious misinformation Isn't the deception itself a sufficiently egregious harm?
- throw646577 2y ago
  In general, if you harm everyone in an instinctively obvious but factually hard-to-demonstrate way, there aren't any meaningful penalties. The situations in which "we all suffer" are the ones where people get away with it, eh? Personifying it this way -- finding someone who is clearly injured -- is the only way to make progress.
  - nonrandomstring 2y ago
    "A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic." -- Stalin Thanks for replying. I wonder, although, in US America for example, it requires "demonstrable harm" to bring lawsuits etc, there is an enduring concept of "the fabric of society" [0] in many legal traditions. (I think it is likely examined by J.S. Mill) and even appears in US congressional commentary [1]. In a digital context there is some mileage here [3]. Might we see a successful lawsuit on the merits that the "mere existence" of some technologies is an affront. "Artificial Intelligence" is after all "artifice" artifice: a clever trick, guile, deception, cunning, a skillful or artful contrivance [0] https://societyforpeace.com/fabric-of-society-meaning/ https://societyforpeace.com/fabric-of-society-meaning/ [1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/10278 https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/1027... [3] https://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/sulr/vol27/iss1/2/ https://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/sulr/vol27/iss1/2/

ambicapter 2y ago

Another reason to put as little as possible on the internet; if you gain any measure of credibility, you now need to safeguard your identity, urls, etc. FOREVER lest someone steal your identity and launder their reputation through it. What a world we've created.

vouaobrasil 2y ago
Isn't it a shame though that we created something like the internet that could have been a good thing and now it's a nightmare like this due to AI? It seems illogical that the same people who theoretically love the internet also created the technology that will make it a nightmare, but I guess money does that to them.
- fennecbutt 2y ago
  Not really. It's not ai fault that humans use for bad. It's not Internet fault that people use it to buy/sell illegal drugs. Same same.

randcraw 2y ago

Excellent and fascinating article. The only way this will end is intervention by federal law enforcement, perhaps by formally proscripting DNS servers to route visitors to a law enforcement site that reports that IP address as a criminal enterprise, and ideally, also providing a link to info on the particular legal hold that was placed on this fraudster so visitors will be informed and can investigate further if they desire. I continue to be astonished at how disengaged federal law enforcement continues to be at today's myriad internet-based crimes. If we need more staff to investigate and prosecute the volume of net-based crime, then the FBI / FCC / FTC should hire more people dammit. What's the argument against doing this, I wonder?

krunck 2y ago
Avoid the FBI/FCC/FTC expenditures and instead fund high school classes in media literacy and analysis.

lazystar 2y ago

ah, another thread on the Carpenter Media Group. previous related discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42212650#42249985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42212650#42249985 this "carpenter group" have gone on a spree in 2024 of snatching up smaller news orgs, and cutting 50% of the staff. seems like a pretty big gamble on AI. > Carpenter Media Group announced earlier this month it had acquired another group of newspapers, Pamplin Media Group, in Oregon. The company now owns and manages 180 newspapers in the United States and Canada. > “We are committed to Everett, The Herald and all who have a stake in its success,” Chairman Todd Carpenter said. “We have deep sympathy for those affected by these changes and will work hard with each of them to see they are well-compensated through a transition period that helps them move forward in a positive way. “Our responsibility to the community and our readers requires us to make difficult business decisions, and then invest in and organize our team to move forward to produce a product that continues to improve and serve. Our track record in this process is good." https://www.heraldnet.com/news/this-breaks-my-heart-roughly- https://www.heraldnet.com/news/this-breaks-my-heart-roughly-...

cgh 2y ago
The article mentions the bad guys in this case are Chinese scammers that acquired the newspaper's domain and filled the site with lightly-rewritten articles from legitimate sources.

neilv 2y ago

Seems worse than garden-variety AI slop. Seems loaded with fraud, defamation, and civic sabotage. Hopefully, lawyers, law enforcement, and perhaps diplomats will rip apart the perpetrators.

lazystar 2y ago
the perpetrator is the "carpenter media group" conglomerate, please see my earlier comment

neom 2y ago

Also now featuring AI chat linking to AI articles in line! AI article is content marketing ad. https://s.h4x.club/RBubww78 https://s.h4x.club/RBubww78

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

runjake 2y ago

Key point: Don't blame AI. It was slop on these[1] sites before it became AI slop. Before AI came along, the local Oregon "news" sites were acquired by national/multinational media companies. They fired the existing writer staff and hired the cheapest people they could to write stories. Articles were riddled with spelling and grammatical errors and the stories did not ask or answer some of the basic questions about the topic of the story. You feed garbage into an AI and you're going to get garbage out. I don't expect it to improve in this market because their goal is to sell ads and get eyeballs. 1. Sinclair, Allen Media, etc

idatum 2y ago
I think this trend is going to get worse and we haven't hit bottom. But the bounce from bottom may be we seek out actual journalists and a new (again) market emerges for human generated, quality content. And I hope this starts at the local level. We need "local papers".
intended 2y ago
How is this the takeaway? The newspaper went under. Then the address got bought by scammers. Did I misread the article?
- runjake 2y ago
  A majority of the article is about large media groups (including the ones I mentioned) buying up local news websites and filling them with low quality, AI-written stories. My comment is about the exact same media groups and geographic areas discussed in the article.

Aloisius 2y ago

Maybe it's time to start poisoning the well. Use AI to generate fake articles for real news sites and let the AI bots crawl them. How much returning traffic is a news plagiarism site going to get if they start reporting on Bigfoot getting into an accident on I-82 near Olympus Mons?