Report Finds AI Chatbots Used by Web Content Farms to Duplicate Content From Top Publishers
A report from NewsGuard, a news-rating group, reveals that numerous websites are employing AI chatbots to duplicate and adapt articles from leading publishers. This sheds light on the potential threat posed by artificial intelligence tools, as they undermine media companies and create confusion within the online news industry.
According to the report, 37 websites, also reviewed by Bloomberg, published stories containing identical text, photos and quotes to articles previously published by the New York Times, Reuters and CNN. The examples NewsGuard found — a mix of online content spaces that publish news, lifestyle content and more, including sites with names like DailyHeadliner.com and TalkGlitz.com — did not mention or refer to the original authors or publications. News aggregators and content farms like this have been around for a long time, and they’ve been trying to generate traffic through search engines.
A report by NewsGuard looked at the use of artificial intelligence to rewrite news stories to increase them. Tensions have escalated in recent months between the media industry and tech companies over concerns that powerful new artificial intelligence tools trained on vast amounts of online data — including copyrighted works — could produce content that undermines the livelihoods of writers, artists and journalists.
Creators have taken legal action against several AI companies alleging copyright infringement, and concerns over the use of AI-generated content in television and film have emerged as a central issue in strikes by actors and writers in Hollywood. The New York Times is also reportedly weighing legal action against ChatGPT’s creator, OpenAI Inc., over how its reports are incorporated into educational data, according to NPR.
The sites cited in the NewsGuard report did not say whether they used AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT or Alphabet Inc’s Google Bard, which can generate human-voiced text in response to a short written prompt. OpenAI specifically prohibits the use of its AI models for “plagiarism”.
Google prohibits the use of creative AI to create and distribute content that is intended to misinform, mislead, or mislead, including presenting AI-generated content as if it were human-made or original, to “deceive.” OpenAI and Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Bloomberg News.
While the websites don’t specify the role of AI in adding stories, NewsGuard found articles on every site with the same sign: an automated error report. NewsGuard said it found 17 articles published on sites like GlobalVillageSpace.com in the past six months that contained AI error messages in the body of the stories.
One post on the website used the same images and quotes that were included in a May New York Times article discussing professional football player Darren Waller’s talents as a musician. The last two lines of the post read: “As an AI model, I cannot vouch for the accuracy of this article as I did not write it. However, I have tried my best to rewrite the article to be Google-friendly.”
The post was removed from GlobalVillageSpace.com after NewsGuard contacted the website, but is still visible via a screenshot taken by the Internet Archive. NewsGuard said it contacted the New York Times, as well as all other publishers whose content it believed had been republished in the group of 37 websites it investigated, as well as the sites that republished the content. Charlie Stadtlander, a spokesman for the New York Times Co., told the news review panel that the website did not have permission to use the article.
“I think we’re going to see more and more of this until the detection tools get better, until news outlets start realizing it’s a problem and until other brokers start cracking down on it,” said NewsGuard’s Jack Brewster. journalist who authored the report.
NewsGuard previously published a report that found dozens of news sites — 49 in total — created by AI chatbots proliferating the web. Many websites started publishing this year as AI tools gained widespread adoption.
For online content farms, using AI tools to write stories for multiple other websites can be a way to increase revenue. Fifteen of the websites NewsGuard investigated displayed automated ads from well-known companies, including articles with content that NewsGuard suspected was rewritten by AI. However, this practice may also test the limits of acceptable compilation of news articles.
In response to questions in May about whether AI-generated websites violated its advertising policies, Google spokesman Michael Aciman said the company does not allow ads alongside harmful content or spam or material copied from other sites.
