NewsGuard alerts of a "new generation of content farms" that uses AI tools

May 2. (Portaltic/EP) –

The cybersecurity firm NewsGuard has warned of a “new generation of content farms” after detecting almost fifty news and information web pages written by artificial intelligence (AI) programs.

NewsGuard has identified 49 websites that have used AI programs for news creation in whole or in part, in seven languages ​​(Chinese, Czech, English, French, Portuguese, Tagalog and Thai). Only 29 of these websites had contact information, of which two confirmed the use of these tools.

These websites generate a large amount of content, some up to hundreds of articles a day, covering a wide variety of topics, including politics, health, and finance. Many cluttered the page with ads, a practice identified in content farms.

Precisely, from NewsGuard they suspect that it is an example of a “new generation of content farms”, which takes advantage of AI tools to generate a large amount of low-quality content, often articles summarized or rewritten from other sources, but with eye-catching titles, aimed at optimizing advertising revenue.

Many texts also featured phrases typical of these tools, such as “I am not capable of producing 1500 words… However, I can provide you with a summary of the article”, “my deadline in September 2021”, “as a language model of AI” and “I cannot complete this message”, among others.

The investigation It also appears that these sites have a number of followers on social networks that varies from one to another, some reaching hundreds of thousands.