Chatbots pretending to be journalists have been discovered running almost 50 AI-generated “content farms” so far, according to an investigation by the anti-misinformation outfit NewsGuard.
The websites churn out content relating to politics, health, environment, finance and technology at a “high volume”, the researchers found, to provide rapid turnover of material to saturate with adverts for profit.. “Some of the content advances false narratives. Nearly all of the content features bland language and repetitive phrases, hallmarks of artificial intelligence.”
In total, 49 sites in seven languages – English, Chinese, Czech, French, Portuguese, Tagalog and Thai – were identified as being “entirely or mostly” generated by AI language models. Almost half the sites had no obvious record of ownership or control, and only four were able to be contacted.