Report by Swasti Sharma
One of the news rating groups – NewsGuard, has revealed the presence of numerous news websites created by AI chatbots. (A computer program designed to converse with human users.)
Bloomberg, a media company, conducted an independent review of 49 websites.
They found that a lot of content, from sites like News Live 79, Daily Business Post, etc. was actually written by programs (bots).
Many of these websites offer information related to breaking news, lifestyle tips, celebrity news, and sponsored content.
All these 49 websites share a common characteristic – None of them disclose that their content is generated by AI chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google Bard from Alphabet Inc. These chatbots are capable of generating detailed text that seems to be generated by a human.
After surveying, it has been discovered that the AI chatbots generated false information for articles published on these websites. For example, in April, CelebritiesDeaths.com named website published an article announcing, “Biden is dead and Kamala Harris is now acting as President”. Furthermore, a website named TNewsNetwork published a story about the deaths of thousands of soldiers in the Russia-Ukraine war which was fully unverified.
These sites are located in various parts of the world. They publish content in multiple languages such as English, Portuguese, Tagalog, and Thai.
The main reason behind generating these websites is earning income. A few of these sites made money through advertising “guest posting”. It is a service that allows people to pay for mentions of their business on these websites to boost their search ranking. Some sites also seemed to focus on building a social media following. An instance is ScoopEarth.com, which produces celebrity biographies and has a related Facebook page with 124,000 followers.
Over 50 percent of the identified AI chatbot-generated sites generates income from programmatic ads, which are automatically bought and sold using algorithms.
AI-generated websites violated the advertising policies, since the company doesn’t allow ads to run alongside the harmful or spammy content, as well as the content that has been copied from other sites (plagiarized).
Google has taken action by removing ads from individual pages on some sites and removing ads entirely from websites where violations were found everywhere.
Identifying the AI generated news website
NewsGuard researchers used various methods to identify the AI-generated news websites.
1. They conducted keyword searches for phrases which are produced by AI chatbots only, such as “as an AI large language model” and “my cutoff date in September 2021″.
2. The researchers also employed the GPTZero, an AI text classifier that assesses whether particular passages are possibly composed entirely by AI, to evaluate the articles.
3.The researchers used various tools, including CrowdTangle and Meltwater, to identify websites that use AI chatbots to produce articles.
Using AI text classifier GPTZero, the researchers discovered that each of the analyzed sites contained at least one error message commonly found in AI-generated text, and some featured fake author profiles.