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OpenAI's super PAC is funding AI-generated news site attacking industry critics
- JumpCrisscross 2mo agoIs there a state in which this constitutes fraud?
- zombot 2mo agoIt would have to be state law so the president can't pardon them.
- JumpCrisscross 2mo ago> would have to be state law so the president can't pardon them Sure. Based on cursory analysis, California (B&P § 17200 + § 17941), New York (§ 63(12)) and New Hampshire (RSA 664:14 / 664:16 + RSA 358-A) seem to be good places to start. Worst case, we get a public record of who paid for what under what pretences.
- defrost 2mo agoHow's this kind of thing play in the US with free speech, Citizen's United, companies with money can make political statements, etc. What's the actual fraud angle? Non disclosure?
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- JumpCrisscross 2mo ago> What's the actual fraud angle? …I literally quoted statute.
- defrost 2mo agoSure, and I literally asked you as you seemed familiar .. point taken, I'll f-off and read US law then. Cheers. BTW - I circled back and answered that question you asked of me. You're welcome. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48917128 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48917128
- ranyume 2mo agoThere are only two industries left in america.
- Teever 2mo agoUnfortunately you're not going to see any sort of legal redress against American oligarchs in any sort of American legal venue. A country like France has shown that they're willing to take no an oligarch[0], and they have the nuclear means to protect themselves from American oligarchs leveraging the American military to punish France for doing so. This kind of stuff will continue until a country like France forces a jet carrying someone like Musk, Altman, Thiel, or Zuckerberg to land so that they can be arrested, tried, convicted, and forced to spend a few years to decades in a drab little room. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel_Durov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel...
- JumpCrisscross 2mo agoThe only reason I’d rather be an oligarch in America than France is because of the lazy nihilism. Pointing to Durov while Bolloré runs free is silly.
- Teever 2mo agoI whole heartedly endorse nations with differing goals and motivations to arrest the oligarchs of competing nations. As some random schmuck this is as far as I can tell the only way out of this mess — make them fight each other instead of me.
- jms703 2mo agoThis is normal tech company marketing strategy, right?
- iammrpayments 2mo agoProbably doing something similar here. This place average post went from “look at this new javascript framework” to “I just became 100x more productive with AI” in the last 3 years
- tokioyoyo 2mo agoIt would be cool to see HN internal stats over the last 5 years. New users, posts from different accounts and etc.
- woozyolliew 2mo agoYeah. Could be astroturfing. Could just be a surge in enthusiasm after 10 years when all we had to be excited about was a new Javascript framework. Your analysis by account age might be telling
- bossyTeacher 2mo ago> Could just be a surge in enthusiasm after 10 years when all we had to be excited about was a new Javascript framework. No. I distinctly remember HN being fairly skeptical of LLMs the way they were sold back in 2023. Then, the astroturfing began happening gradually. First in the comments and then in the posts.
- OkGoDoIt 2mo ago“Using your own firm’s president as a supposedly independent expert, without acknowledging the relationship, is a striking departure from basic journalistic norms” Well that’s about the nicest possible way to phrase that… Why do people insist on giving shady characters the benefit of the doubt? It’s pretty clear what’s happening here and yet the level of effort put into avoiding judgement seems excessive.
- protocolture 2mo ago>But there don’t seem to be any contributors, or at least not human ones. I ran every article on the site through Pangram (the AI detector that credibly claims a near-zero false-positive rate). Of the 94 articles, 69% came back flagged as fully AI-generated, with another 28% flagged as partially AI-generated. Only three articles were classified as human-authored. How credible is this credible claim?
- antonvs 2mo agoRegardless of that claim, here’s a good test for how real this site is - it’s called “The Wire by Acutus”, but try to find a site for “Acutus”. Is it Acutus Medical, a “cardiac arrhythmia management company”, or Acutus Partners, “Expert healthcare consulting for transformative growth strategies that empower healthcare organizations to thrive and succeed”? Neither seem obviously correct, and there are no other good candidates, not to mention that the lack of a link from “The Wire” to its supposed parent is suspicious.
- protocolture 2mo ago>but try to find a site for “Acutus”. Interesting test to the modern marketing theory that something needs a website to be real and tangible these days. Its certainly worth following up on. Its cool and good to know who is paying someone. But like, running a news site seems like something everyone is welcome to try and fail at? My only concern is the idea that AI text has magical properties that can be tested and verified with 99% accuracy.
- NitpickLawyer 2mo agoIf anything this shows how pangram is unreliable. Chances are, if someone is running an article generation thing, it'll be 100% generated. Writing 3 / 100 articles "by hand" doesn't make any sense.
- oersted 2mo agoThey do seem to have an internal review process, some articles might have been heavily edited, particularly early in the development process. But indeed, if Pangram is marketing itself as "near-zero false-positives" now, that entails that the are aggressively biasing it towards being conservative, likely leading to lots of false-negatives and low match scores on AI content.
- ProAm 2mo agoThe only reason OpenAI wants to give 5% of the company to the US government is so they become 'to big to fail'. They dont give a s** about the US, its just a way to get funding when the bubble bursts
- madhu_ghalame 2mo ago[dead]
- 0xDEAFBEAD 2mo agoFunny, I was told by HN commenters that worries about AI risk are just a clever marketing strategy on the part of OpenAI and friends. I wonder why they would be working so hard to push back?
- emsign 2mo agoRegulatory capture. They are the hyperscalers who invested and still invest heavily in hard tech, like data centers. They need regulation of "uncontrolled" AI models, so that Joe Smoe doesn't ditch his ChatGPT subscription and uses his local LLMs and agent harness setup in his home lab. Or some open weights model, or the condensed Chinese ones... it's "regulate everything else to death that is better than our enshittified OG models behind a paywall". The trajectory is clear and the hyperscalers are in an disadvantage: they need to become bigger and bigger while models, frameworks and harnesses that are "good enough" for 95% of all people become smaller and specialized hardware becomes cheaper and less energy hungry. In the end the only viable customers that are left for the big ones is the military and... the military. But even the Pentagon realizes that a decentralized less fragile approach is actually safer instead of having big data centers that could be Wildberried by an adversary, that is if the alcoholic in charge isn't firing some generals who act too smart again. Machine vision which isn't even real AI is capable of destroying targets in Ukraine for instance. Dirt cheap. And Palantir's Maven Smart System was incapable of predicting the most obvious flaws in the Iran war, like how easy it is to to strike US bases or close the Strait of Hormuz. I'm not saying condensing the killchain is useless, I'm saying that it's not everything. People aren't dumb. So they must be strong-manned and cheated into submission.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 2mo agoIf AI industry critics are valuable as a means of OpenAI achieving regulatory capture, why is OpenAI attacking critics using underhanded means, as in the OP?
- oersted 2mo agoRecent events have shown that it's a double-edged sword. Sure the Mythos hype probably drove a lot of sales and investment, but it also led to a crackdown from the government.
- Alien1Being 2mo agoPerfectly rational. Unleash bots and sock puppets, generate mindless hype. Add a bit of circular accounting. Watch the investments roll in and the share price soar up. Profit...
- dzhiurgis 2mo agoGrok's unhinged mode is amazing for trolling anti-ai cooks. I've been having a blast.
- userbinator 2mo agoHad to look this up to see they really named it that, but then again, probably not surprising considering Musk's cars have a "ludicrous mode".
- dzhiurgis 2mo agoYes, and others brains still runs in "pedestrian mode." Some of us prefer acceleration.
- anonreplier 2mo agoNot hard to accelerate something going that slowly
- jpnc 2mo agoCertainly money well spent and technology properly utilized. Could have learned an actual skill instead.
- dzhiurgis 2mo ago[flagged]
- Alien1Being 2mo agoFraud, but a presidential pardon has already been paid for in advance.
- Alifatisk 2mo agoYou know whats crazy? We’re in bizarre times were this can actually be true. Things we joked about before which was obviously too nonsensical to be true is no longer the case in my world.
- joshspankit 2mo agoThe tricky part about “layer 2 sarcasm” is that it has a tendency to inspire exactly the wrong people in to making it true
- tripleee 2mo ago> When I ran the message through Pangram, an AI content detector that credibly claims a near-zero false-positive rate, the email came back as “fully AI-generated.” Uh huh.. AI content detectors don't work. This article plays right into my biases but I don't think it's actually very credible? They're just guessing that some unknown blog is funded by OpenAI because it has maybe-AI-generated articles that use similar talking points "These are the talking points of Leading The Future, the $125 million super PAC funded primarily by OpenAI president Greg Brockman" I'm sure OpenAI is doing a tonne of astroturfing but my god this is weak
- oersted 2mo agoI agree that the connection to OpenAI is very speculative here. It's true that Pangram is also very unreliable, and the match is pretty weak anyways: "69% came back flagged as fully AI-generated, with another 28% flagged as partially AI-generated". But the analysis of the internal admin pages for generating articles, the API and the interview structure are pretty damming evidence that this is largely driven by AI.
- tripleee 2mo agoOh with that I wasn't arguing the blog wasn't AI. I'm sure it is. My point there is that stating that any Pangram settles anything is a huge mark against the author's credibility
- runtime_lens 2mo ago[flagged]
- zombot 2mo agoOf course they do. Using their own slop generators to propagate their marketing lies is probably cheaper than paying shills.
- narrator 2mo agoMeanwhile, the AI critics got an enormous war chest thanks to Vitalic giving them all his dog coins as a joke that ended up being worth almost a billion to fight against AI. https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/03/14/vitalik-buterin-recounts-how-shiba-inu-tokens-became-a-usd1-billion-ai-policy-war-chest https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/03/14/vitalik-buterin-...