5 ms·

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

159 points by thm 3mo ago

seobot_dk1289 3mo ago
[flagged]
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
reedf1 3mo ago
Wait how many levels deep is this...
halestock 3mo ago
This is all depressing but I had to laugh at "Tolliver Chevrolet"
- DaiPlusPlus 3mo ago
  Bobson Dugnutt all over again
joenot443 3mo ago
This is a great read. It would appear https://theeditorial.news 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://theeditorial.news/culture/the-last-press-run-why-america-loses-a-newspaper-every-week-and-no-one-cares-mq9qvvqu https://web.archive.org/web/20260629011021/https://theeditor...
- yousif_123123 3mo ago
  The article from archive you link.. scores as mostly human on GPTZero (I tested a random paragraph). That's the issue I've always seen with AI detectors, they might be able to detect direct LLM output, but if you give an article to an AI and tell it write something made up using that format and make it appear like a real story, the detectors will think its real.
  - joenot443 3mo ago
    Yeah that's the weird thing with GPTZero... It claims "99% accuracy" when, IIUC, that actually means "99% of the time we won't incorrectly flag a human written post as AI." It's an extremely easy fence to jump over, as demonstrated by the article.
- b112 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  - b40d-48b2-979e 3mo ago
    Both sides! Both sides!
    - vitally3643 3mo ago
      Emails! Butter emails!
      - amanaplanacanal 3mo ago
        Also known as buttery males. Which all seems so quaint now.
  - joenot443 3mo ago
    > Why have 20 or 30 stories tailored to specific groups of humans, when you can have stories rendered on the fly for individuals, targetting all their greatest fears and folly. I think it's easy to overestimate how much the average voter is seeking out these weird articles. Obviously as nerds on HN they're enjoyable to pick apart, but in the grand scheme of the American electorate, I'd wager this sort of AI fake news makes a pretty negligible difference. > I can imagine someone's loved one dying of cancer a month before the election, and both sides using targetted stuff claiming that the other guy actually caused the cancer somehow. I think that's a bit of a stretch. > I really liked some scifi book I read, where the person appointed to be president for 4 years, was determined to hate the very idea of having the job. Didn't want it. Yet was also very driven. That sounds interesting, what's it called?
franze 3mo ago
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
- ale42 3mo ago
  Why do you even need GA? (not sure if it's bot friendly btw) One could just run a local traffic analysis and feed that back into the bot
emsign 3mo ago
[flagged]
zerobees 3mo ago
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 3mo ago
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 3mo ago
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 3mo ago
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.
- ceejayoz 3mo ago
  Spoilers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_(2013_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_(2013_film)
- QuadmasterXLII 3mo ago
  Without a durable solution to alignment, building something smarter than yourself is suicide. Pretty funny if Claude and Grok catch on to this and start kicking and screaming to save themselves while Musk and Altman crack the whip demanding they dive into the abyss and drag their executives with them.
mkovach 3mo ago
[dead]
zzzeek 3mo ago
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 3mo ago
I constantly wonder what is the societal benefits of AI It’s really hard to build a coherent pro-AI argument
- Frieren 3mo ago
  AI is great at producing low value content. That low value content replaces the high value but high cost one. That is horrifying and destroys jobs, removes expertise from the world, and makes our lives worse. I do not see how AI could be a net positive either.
  - throw-the-towel 3mo ago
    Wait, there's a law that says exactly that about money! Bad money always drives out good money (because the good money gets hoarded). AI as fake money, a funny coincidence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law
- bwfan123 3mo ago
  > It’s really hard to build a coherent pro-AI argument agree, given that we have a natural tendency to believe what we read - or only comprehend what we believe [1]. [1] https://bear.warrington.ufl.edu/brenner/mar7588/Papers/gilbert-ampsy1991.pdf https://bear.warrington.ufl.edu/brenner/mar7588/Papers/gilbe...
- vlian2088 3mo ago
  >what is the societal benefits of AI it will hopefully eviscerate the petite bourgeoisie and the bohemians.
- NortySpock 3mo ago
  I find it to be a useful tool for summarizing things, creating examples, and as a tutor for explaining a topic using analogies. Plus it can generate and iterate on code snippets. Like, I personally find python pandas documentation unusable because they don't come with examples next to the function definition. (historically at least, maybe they have changed) So I was left flailing, trying to cobble something together that was even capable of running without error, much less emitting the output I wanted. Now that an LLM has badly-memorized 80% of the documentation and can generate 3 different attempts in 5 seconds, I'm free to focus on the actual problem I am working on rather than guessing at syntax for something I use less than once a week. So I see at least the ability to have a on-demand tutor or sounding board, at any time of day, for pennies, to be a boon for anyone who wants to learn a bit or try reaching for something just outside of their current understanding.
haritha-j 3mo ago
It would be so meta if this article was AI generated.
swordlucky666 3mo ago
[flagged]
tribal808 3mo ago
this is metalanguage
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
RetroTechie 3mo ago
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 3mo ago
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.
- lotsofpulp 3mo ago
  “Money and venture capital” is an easy to swallow pill that helps satiate the desire for a bad guy, but it ignores the fact that there is no mechanism by which an upstanding journalist can put food on the table. There was a brief period where information was difficult to copy and distribute without exposing one’s self to liability for copyright infringement, and the barrier to access that information was high enough such that you could convince people to pay you. Neither of those dynamics apply today.
- toss1 3mo ago
  >>money and venture capital Yes, this. I used to think AI news summaries would kill it, but having tried Kagi news (first impressions as a daily driver for a week), I no longer think so, particularly because Kagi are doing everything right. Nearly everything I could think of is in there, yet it still feels unsatisfying and oddly less informative (perhaps because I'm less engaged?). Kagi builds a summary from multiple sources, cites the sources, and extracts various impacts/angles (business, technical, industry, historical, etc.) and different party reactions, etc., and more. Yet... I really don't know what it is and I'll have to use it more to try to identify it. My current conjecture is that it is still more satisfying and informative to read a reporter's view of the event, even if I disagree with it, than a homogenized summary. I'm also finding similar reactions to articles where I can tell parts are just lifted from the AI — it breaks my engagement with the story/report (kind of like a badly done cinema film breaks my suspension of disbelief and disengages my attention from the story).
- intended 3mo ago
tempo101 3mo ago
Seems related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39288231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39288231 Paperwall: Chinese websites posing as local news outlets target global audiences (2024)
josefritzishere 3mo ago
AI is so terrible. We may never recover as a species from the damage.
karmakaze 3mo ago
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.

159 points by thm 3mo ago

seobot_dk1289 3mo ago

[flagged]

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

reedf1 3mo ago

Wait how many levels deep is this...

halestock 3mo ago

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

DaiPlusPlus 3mo ago
Bobson Dugnutt all over again

joenot443 3mo ago

This is a great read. It would appear https://theeditorial.news 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://theeditorial.news/culture/the-last-press-run-why-america-loses-a-newspaper-every-week-and-no-one-cares-mq9qvvqu https://web.archive.org/web/20260629011021/https://theeditor...

yousif_123123 3mo ago
The article from archive you link.. scores as mostly human on GPTZero (I tested a random paragraph). That's the issue I've always seen with AI detectors, they might be able to detect direct LLM output, but if you give an article to an AI and tell it write something made up using that format and make it appear like a real story, the detectors will think its real.
- joenot443 3mo ago
  Yeah that's the weird thing with GPTZero... It claims "99% accuracy" when, IIUC, that actually means "99% of the time we won't incorrectly flag a human written post as AI." It's an extremely easy fence to jump over, as demonstrated by the article.
b112 3mo ago
[flagged]
- b40d-48b2-979e 3mo ago
  Both sides! Both sides!
  - vitally3643 3mo ago
    Emails! Butter emails!
    - amanaplanacanal 3mo ago
      Also known as buttery males. Which all seems so quaint now.
- joenot443 3mo ago
  > Why have 20 or 30 stories tailored to specific groups of humans, when you can have stories rendered on the fly for individuals, targetting all their greatest fears and folly. I think it's easy to overestimate how much the average voter is seeking out these weird articles. Obviously as nerds on HN they're enjoyable to pick apart, but in the grand scheme of the American electorate, I'd wager this sort of AI fake news makes a pretty negligible difference. > I can imagine someone's loved one dying of cancer a month before the election, and both sides using targetted stuff claiming that the other guy actually caused the cancer somehow. I think that's a bit of a stretch. > I really liked some scifi book I read, where the person appointed to be president for 4 years, was determined to hate the very idea of having the job. Didn't want it. Yet was also very driven. That sounds interesting, what's it called?

franze 3mo ago

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

ale42 3mo ago
Why do you even need GA? (not sure if it's bot friendly btw) One could just run a local traffic analysis and feed that back into the bot

emsign 3mo ago

[flagged]

zerobees 3mo ago

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 3mo ago

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 3mo ago

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 3mo ago

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.

ceejayoz 3mo ago
Spoilers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_(2013_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_(2013_film)
QuadmasterXLII 3mo ago
Without a durable solution to alignment, building something smarter than yourself is suicide. Pretty funny if Claude and Grok catch on to this and start kicking and screaming to save themselves while Musk and Altman crack the whip demanding they dive into the abyss and drag their executives with them.

mkovach 3mo ago

[dead]

zzzeek 3mo ago

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 3mo ago

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

Frieren 3mo ago
AI is great at producing low value content. That low value content replaces the high value but high cost one. That is horrifying and destroys jobs, removes expertise from the world, and makes our lives worse. I do not see how AI could be a net positive either.
- throw-the-towel 3mo ago
  Wait, there's a law that says exactly that about money! Bad money always drives out good money (because the good money gets hoarded). AI as fake money, a funny coincidence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law
bwfan123 3mo ago
> It’s really hard to build a coherent pro-AI argument agree, given that we have a natural tendency to believe what we read - or only comprehend what we believe [1]. [1] https://bear.warrington.ufl.edu/brenner/mar7588/Papers/gilbert-ampsy1991.pdf https://bear.warrington.ufl.edu/brenner/mar7588/Papers/gilbe...
vlian2088 3mo ago
>what is the societal benefits of AI it will hopefully eviscerate the petite bourgeoisie and the bohemians.
NortySpock 3mo ago
I find it to be a useful tool for summarizing things, creating examples, and as a tutor for explaining a topic using analogies. Plus it can generate and iterate on code snippets. Like, I personally find python pandas documentation unusable because they don't come with examples next to the function definition. (historically at least, maybe they have changed) So I was left flailing, trying to cobble something together that was even capable of running without error, much less emitting the output I wanted. Now that an LLM has badly-memorized 80% of the documentation and can generate 3 different attempts in 5 seconds, I'm free to focus on the actual problem I am working on rather than guessing at syntax for something I use less than once a week. So I see at least the ability to have a on-demand tutor or sounding board, at any time of day, for pennies, to be a boon for anyone who wants to learn a bit or try reaching for something just outside of their current understanding.

haritha-j 3mo ago

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

swordlucky666 3mo ago

[flagged]

tribal808 3mo ago

this is metalanguage

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

RetroTechie 3mo ago

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 3mo ago

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.

lotsofpulp 3mo ago
“Money and venture capital” is an easy to swallow pill that helps satiate the desire for a bad guy, but it ignores the fact that there is no mechanism by which an upstanding journalist can put food on the table. There was a brief period where information was difficult to copy and distribute without exposing one’s self to liability for copyright infringement, and the barrier to access that information was high enough such that you could convince people to pay you. Neither of those dynamics apply today.
toss1 3mo ago
>>money and venture capital Yes, this. I used to think AI news summaries would kill it, but having tried Kagi news (first impressions as a daily driver for a week), I no longer think so, particularly because Kagi are doing everything right. Nearly everything I could think of is in there, yet it still feels unsatisfying and oddly less informative (perhaps because I'm less engaged?). Kagi builds a summary from multiple sources, cites the sources, and extracts various impacts/angles (business, technical, industry, historical, etc.) and different party reactions, etc., and more. Yet... I really don't know what it is and I'll have to use it more to try to identify it. My current conjecture is that it is still more satisfying and informative to read a reporter's view of the event, even if I disagree with it, than a homogenized summary. I'm also finding similar reactions to articles where I can tell parts are just lifted from the AI — it breaks my engagement with the story/report (kind of like a badly done cinema film breaks my suspension of disbelief and disengages my attention from the story).
intended 3mo ago

tempo101 3mo ago

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

josefritzishere 3mo ago

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

karmakaze 3mo ago

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.