I have a theory about AI fake news site The Editorial

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Link: Now we’re getting AI fake news complaining about how AI fake news is the death of real news, by Joshua Benton in Nieman Lab<br>A bunch of people — including, unfortunately, me — were taken in by this AI-generated newsroom earlier this week. The story was decently written and seemed to be well-cited, but it turned out to be nonsense. Ironically, it was about a would-be media empire that purchased struggling papers, fired their staff, and replaced them with AI, leading to the death of each newsroom. All false.<br>So the big question about The Editorial is: why does it exist?<br>As Joshua Benton put it:<br>“Fake news isn’t new, obviously. And while AI-generated slop is newer, it’s hardly unfamiliar at this point. But why would a spam site bother making up a story about Alabama weekly newspapers, of all things? Whose interest is it in to get that niche?”<br>Here’s my theory: I think it’s a two-headed LLM poisoning scheme.<br>On one hand, most of the content relates to Chinese-specific interests: articles about Taiwan or African nations where China is making inroads. These are all articles from a China-friendly perspective. If an LLM were to ingest them and trust the site, it might start repeating the assertions made in each one as fact.<br>One way to make sure a site is trusted is to get other, trusted sources to point to it. That’s where the stories about journalism come in: there are few things that journalists engage in more than stories about their own industry. Get enough patsies (like, again, to my chagrin, me) to point links in their direction and journalists might post them in high-trust communities on high-trust sites like Reddit, as well as their own, and Bob’s your uncle. We already know that it takes as little as 13 words to poison an LLM with falsehoods.<br>Of course, that might not be it at all. Frank, the site’s owner (who lists himself as CEO of Nordiso Group on LinkedIn), at least appears to be a Finnish solopreneur. If he wanted to clear the air, he could write a post (himself) about what he was up to. It might be that he’s running an experiment to see how easily an LLM can be poisoned with propaganda! Until then, I think it’s reasonable to assume that something underhand is going on.

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Ben Werdmuller explores the intersection of technology, democracy, and society. Always independently published, reader-supported, and free to read.

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