Geoffrey Hinton who won the ‘Nobel Prize of computing’ for his trailblazing work on neural networks is now free to speak about the risks of AI.
www.theverge.com
unable to copy from page, sorry you'll have to go read yourself.
www.newsguardtech.com
Rise of the Newsbots: AI-Generated News Websites Proliferating Online
NewsGuard has identified 49 news and information sites that appear to be almost entirely written by artificial intelligence software. A new generation of content farms is on the way.
By McKenzie Sadeghi and Lorenzo Arvanitis | Published on May 1, 2023
Artificial intelligence tools are now being used to populate so-called content farms, referring to low-quality websites around the world that churn out vast amounts of clickbait articles to optimize advertising revenue, NewsGuard found.
In April 2023, NewsGuard identified
49 websites spanning
seven languages — Chinese, Czech, English, French, Portuguese, Tagalog, and Thai — that appear to be entirely or mostly generated by artificial intelligence language models designed to mimic human communication — here in the form of what appear to be typical news websites.
The websites, which often fail to disclose ownership or control, produce a high volume of content related to a variety of topics, including politics, health, entertainment, finance, and technology. Some publish hundreds of articles a day. Some of the content advances false narratives. Nearly all of the content features bland language and repetitive phrases, hallmarks of artificial intelligence.
Many of the sites are saturated with advertisements, indicating that they were likely designed to generate revenue from programmatic ads — ads that are placed algorithmically across the web and that finance much of the world’s media — just as the internet’s first generation of content farms, operated by humans, were built to do.
In short, as numerous and more powerful AI tools have been unveiled and made available to the public in recent months,
concerns that they could be used to conjure up entire news organizations — once the subject of speculation by media scholars — have now become a reality.
In April 2023, NewsGuard sent emails to the 29 sites in the analysis that listed contact information, and two confirmed that they have used AI. Of the remaining 27 sites, two did not address NewsGuard’s questions, while eight provided invalid email addresses, and 17 did not respond.
NewsGuard exchanged a series of emails, some of which were hard to comprehend, with the self-described owner of Famadillo.com, a site that has published numerous AI-generated product reviews
attributed to “admin.” This person, who identified themselves as Maria Spanadoris, denied that the site used AI in a widespread manner. “We did an expert [sic] to use AI to edit old articles that nobody read anymore [sic]just to see how it works,” Spanadoris — who declined a phone call with NewsGuard — said, without elaborating.
Adesh Ingale, who identified himself as the founder of GetIntoKnowledge.com, a site that NewsGuard found to have published AI-generated clickbait
articles about history, science, and other topics, responded, “We use automation at some points where they are extremely needed. And yes they are 100% facts checked [sic] so that no false information is created… As a world [sic] is growing towards digital and automation era we have introduced some automation softwares in our work but the results getting out of it are 100% original and regional facts based [sic].” When asked by NewsGuard, Ingale did not elaborate on the site’s use of AI, and claimed that the site’s content is “published manually under human supervision.” Ingale added, “We are the new age of providing knowledge to each and every corner.”