Dozens of websites generating low-quality 'clickbait' content using AI: study

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A new study from NewsGuard revealed dozens of websites around the world are using artificial intelligence to generate low-quality ‘clickbait’ articles in order to make money from advertisements.

The platform identified 49 websites that appear to be almost entirely generated by artificial intelligence software—producing high volumes of articles relating to a variety of topics such as politics, health, entertainment, finance and technology.

NewsGuard says these websites are mostly operating in seven languages including Chinese, Czech, English, French, Portuguese, Tagalog and Thai.

According to the study, some of these websites publish hundreds of articles per day—some of which peddle false or misleading narratives. For example, CelebritiesDeaths.com published an article in April titled “Biden dead. Harris acting President, address 9am ET.”

NewsGuard also said the AI generated sites it analyzed produced articles that appeared to closely resemble human text, but with differences such as repeated phrases like “in conclusion” and “it is important to remember.”

For instance, WaveFunction.info, a site that was registered in March in Shanghai, published an article in April which read like a typical report about measures recently announced by the group of G7 countries.

“In conclusion, the agreement reached by the G7 finance ministers and central bank governors to deliver prompt fiscal support and implement coordinated measures to counteract the economic impact of the coronavirus outbreak is a positive development,” the article stated.

NewsGuard says that it sent emails to some of the sites it analyzed that listed contact information, but only two confirmed they have used AI while most of them did not reply and some provided invalid email addresses.

The study also found the AI-driven sites typically have generic names such as Biz Breaking News, News Live 79, Daily Business Post, and Market News Reports—suggesting they are operated by actual news organizations.

Data from NewsGuard shows AI-generated sites such as BestBudgetUSA.com often rewrite or summarize content from other sources such as CNN.

NewsGuard found that many of the AI-generated articles are credited to “Admin” and “Editor” or have no bylines at all, while other sites feature fake author profiles.

The study also found it was often easy to determine when AI was used to generate content based on the text in the articles. NewsGuard says dozens of articles on BestBudgetUSA.com contain phrases such as “I am not capable of producing 1500 words” indicating the websites are run “with little to no human oversight.”

Methodology:

NewsGuard analysts identified the AI-generated websites through keyword searches for phrases commonly produced by AI chatbots. The searches were conducted on the search engines Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo, as well as a media monitoring platform. The analysts then verified that the sites were mostly or entirely generated by AI by examining other content for AI phrases and inputting articles into the AI text classifier GPTZero.

Reporting for this story was paid for through The Afghan Journalists in Residence Project funded by Meta.