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iingot OP t1_j5ljnds wrote

"The prominent tech news site CNET's attempt to pass off AI-written work keeps getting worse. First, the site was caught quietly publishing the machine learning-generated stories in the first place. Then the AI-generated content was found to be riddled with factual errors. Now, CNET's AI also appears to have been a serial plagiarist — of actual humans' work.

The site initially addressed widespread backlash to the bot-written articles by assuring readers that a human editor was carefully fact-checking them all prior to publication.

Afterward, though, Futurism found that a substantial number of errors had been slipping into the AI's published work. CNET, a titan of tech journalism that sold for $1.8 billion back in 2008, responded by issuing a formidable correction and slapping a warning on all the bot's prior work, alerting readers that the posts' content was under factual review. Days later, its parent company Red Ventures announced in a series of internal meetings that it was temporarily pausing the AI-generated articles at CNET and various other properties including Bankrate, at least until the storm of negative press died down."

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Fake_William_Shatner t1_j5lx4tg wrote

>at least until the storm of negative press died down."

Aah, you can just smell the integrity.

I can understand skipping some of the filler articles but -- incorrect data for a tech publisher?

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DragoonXNucleon t1_j5mgnnt wrote

There is no money for journalism until social media companies pay for stealing content. This article here is being stolen, with its entire content copied into this thread.

How can we expect them to pay journalists if we also force them to give their content for free? Reddit should have to pay per view when it clips content.

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NotThatZachRoberts t1_j5n2dri wrote

No one wants to pay subscriptions, no one wants to see ads, no one wants to subscribe to an email list even. I don't understand how people think good journalism happens.

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UniversalMomentum t1_j5oq5r9 wrote

I don't mind ads, but the kind of ads and the placement matters. They abused their advertising privileges and hurt their own brand reputation in the process. It was a foolish move! Similar regulations and content quality from TV should have made it to internet much faster, but many only half ass invested and their websites reflected the unprofessional and even dangerous state that kind of bad decision making produces. They get what they deserve on that one. Media has to earn it's reputation, not get special treatment.

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Fake_William_Shatner t1_j5o84pp wrote

When a mommy and a daddy journalist like each other a lot and one of them drinks heavily.

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Alexander1899 t1_j5odxlf wrote

Same thing with YouTube, and pretty much anything online.

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UniversalMomentum t1_j5or3if wrote

Well .. isn't that the same as TV has been for decades as the dominate media source? I don't think many people signed up for cable to watch TV news they were getting with their antenna for free/with ads. Cable just bundled news with it, so this business model where you either pay for no ads or get free content with ads has been around a long time now.. since radio and TV broadcasting came out. In that case the nature of the broadcasts made subscriptions too hard to pull off because all you needed is a receiver, but still the business model seems to have worked just fine for a long time. It might not produce the most integrity, but subscription only news means the majority of your citizens never sign up and get no news.. which in theory should be bad, but given the state of polarization might oddly work out better.

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twbrn t1_j5ok4w0 wrote

> How can we expect them to pay journalists if we also force them to give their content for free? Reddit should have to pay per view when it clips content.

Thing is though, it goes both ways. A lot of tech sites these days simply skim Reddit, Twitter, and other similar sites to produce "content."

Speaking as a former technology journalist, a lot of this goes back to the erosion of online advertising values that has been accelerating for 15 years. Websites put more ads on, and more obnoxious ads so that people are forced to see them. More ads means less revenue per ad, which means sites put on more ads, which means less revenue... All this adds up to them trying to balance the equation on the side of getting more clicks, and getting content FASTER than anyone else. Not necessarily better, just faster.

Where you used to have websites that did extensive, in-depth testing of devices, now you have somebody slapping together a handful of photos and a reworded press release and calling it a "review" of a new device. It doesn't matter that it's not good; it didn't take long to produce, and they don't care about the quality of their content. Likewise the spike in clickbait even among formerly respectable publications; if a site can get you to click on an article about "The shocking new feature included in all Samsung phones" or the like, it doesn't matter that it was a nothingburger or that it took them five minutes to put together. You already clicked and gave them their ad impressions. Or skimming some user quotes off Reddit and Twitter and giving it some snappy name like "Users trash latest Google service over massive flaws."

The problem comes down to, there's no easy way to fix this. I suppose you could try to build a select crowd that's willing to pay for quality journalism ala Patreon, but Google provides a massive engine to anyone who wants to throw their stuff out there for free. It's like a small, quality restaurant trying to compete with McDonalds. They might attract a following, but McDonalds is still going to represent 99% of the volume.

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DragoonXNucleon t1_j5onjvc wrote

There is an easy fix. Its revenue sharing.

If you display the totality of content, you either pay for it or take it down.

Back in the print days, if I just plagiarized your article and printed it in my own magazine you could sue me. Why has this changed? Well, Google writes the laws now.

In video media there are fair use laws. You can only use X seconds of a video before it becomes theft. Reddit, Facebook, Google are all selling other peoples content. Imagine if web site runners could set DNS record indicating a rev share PPV price. If a piece of content receives over X views that price kicks in and the owner would be liable.

Until we make laws to protect journalism, we won't have it.

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twbrn t1_j5pawtn wrote

In principle, it sounds good. The problem is that laws are made generally by people who have no idea about how technology works. And even when they do, they don't want to. We're still struggling with laws for something as basic as network neutrality.

There's also a lot of wiggle room that would make it difficult for a one-size-fits-all law to cover and, more importantly, enforce. You'd be looking at needing some kind of agency that actually made sure the rules were followed and settled disputes.

Maybe it could be done on a good faith basis, the way that groups like the Writers Guild of America arbitrate cases among members. If you could get Google and a few other big players on board, you might have a groundswell. But there's a lot of incentive for big tech companies not to want to stop the free circulation of content when the only people they're really hurting are writers and readers, not themselves.

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M_Mich t1_j5oqyr0 wrote

it’s why i canceled my apple news subscription. all the stories outside of cnn and bbc were websites creating “news” about reddit or twitter posts that had high controversy. and a number of articles that pointed to reddit then the reddit page linked to the article

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JonOrangeElise t1_j5r00h6 wrote

Well, Google claims to be making an attempt to penalize content farm journalism by rewarding EAT (expertise, authority, trust) signals and penalizing sites that toss shit together or (presumably) resort to AI. But the google bot is capricious and inconsistent and too often legitimate news sources get the short end of the algo update too. Curious: what career did you segue too after tech journalism?

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twbrn t1_j5rmyxh wrote

I'm glad that Google is at least trying. The problem with Google though is that they entrust making choices about content to an algorithm, and eventually people find ways to beat it. Like when they started measuring the time people spent on a site as an indicator of content quality, and sites started throwing a ton of fluff at you before they got to the actual information to prolong your visit. (If you've ever wondered why some sites/articles have a recap of the entire history of Samsung before some bit of news about the newest phone, or a long rambling personal story before a recipe for biscuit dough... that's a big reason why.) If there's a way to exploit the rules, people will find it. So I guess you could say I'm on the skeptical side to any kind of automated solution; machine learning only goes so far against human cleverness.

> Curious: what career did you segue too after tech journalism?

To be perfectly honest, I started taking entry level factory jobs to make ends meet. I'm currently looking for another of those, because I don't expect any of the copywriting jobs I've applied for to come through for me, nor any of the remote customer service stuff. So that, and hoping that my next novel meets some success.

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MechanicalBengal t1_j5ojsi2 wrote

Ok… Explain how youtubers like Coffeezilla, who do real journalism, exist.

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Fake_William_Shatner t1_j5o82l7 wrote

>How can we expect them to pay journalists if we also force them to give their content for free?

Nope.

But then, who will do investigative reporting? Fools! That's who.

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Dohnakun t1_j5oobpr wrote

> This article here is being stolen, with its entire content copied into this thread.

Fair use, how the internet works, free sample for advertising, yadda yadda.

> if we also force them to give their content for free

No one forces them. Newspapers formed the ad-ridden internet we have today. They knew that their traditional business model doesn't work here.

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iwasbatman t1_j5lv1y6 wrote

If humans need to fact-check they might as well write the articles themselves.

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UniversalMomentum t1_j5osd68 wrote

There might be benefit to having humans write and AI fact check or AI write and humans fact check.. once AI is more than just a toy/sensation at least.

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dentastic t1_j5oqk7j wrote

Riddle me this tho: is it ever possible for an ai to not plagiarize? Everything they write has to come from something they've seen in their database.

I suppose the same could ve said for humans, but idk what counts in that regard

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OneWithMath t1_j5p4rlc wrote

>Everything they write has to come from something they've seen in their database.

The models learn ideas and concepts, they don't just copy text. Now, using an idea without giving credit is plagiarism, that makes it problematic that they can't cite sources for generated text. However they don't simply recreate prior sentences under normal conditions.

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gerkletoss t1_j5m492s wrote

How was the plagiarism measured though? And how does it compare to human-written articles?

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