As concerned as educators are about students using ChatGPT to do their homework, it seems a more worrying use of artificial intelligence (AI) has already emerged.
Internet researchers warn that click-bait websites, which make money from programmatic advertising, are “proliferating” with AI chatbots.
Many experts warned of this probability during the excitement when OpenAI released its CPT-3 software on November 30 2022. Forget the more noble uses of a large-language model (LLM) and its extraordinary ability to replicate human writing; the scammers have spotted an upgrade for their nefarious needs.
It’s feels like nonpractising energy minister Gwede Mantashe’s attempts to get Karpowership into the energy mix. Given the option of elevating humanity, or truly ending South Africa’s energy crisis, some people opt for greedy exploitation.
So-called content farms have been around for years — and were amplified by Google’s introduction of programmatic advertising. Many of the pro-Trump websites that sprung up before the 2016 US presidential election, were run, not by his political supporters, but savvy scam artists whose “fake news” stories were click-bait to show advertising.
A surprising portion of those came from a small Macedonian town called Veles. Canny Balkan teenagers in the town of 44,000 registered about 150 US political websites. This “digital gold rush”, as BuzzFeed News called it, produced headlines like “Hillary’s Illegal Email Just Killed Its First American Spy” and “This is How Liberals Destroyed America, This Is Why We Need Trump in the White House”. They lured Trump’s fans in their millions, making the websites a small fortune.
“Liberty Writers News, a two-person site operating out of a house in the San Francisco Bay area, generates income of between $10,000 and $40,000 a month from banks of ads that run along the side and bottom of every story,” the Guardian reported in 2016.
That’s bad news for both the media and readers — especially if Carl Niehaus discovers ChatGPT
It still seems so improbable that European teenagers could have such a large impact on global politics, but such is the world created by social media and financed by heinous programmatic advertising. These “clickbait political sites” were “getting a big boost from Facebook,” the Guardian said.
Now these click-bait “AI-generated news websites [are] proliferating online,” warns NewsGuard, a US media-monitoring organisation that provides credibility ratings and “nutrition labels” about news and information websites.
It found 49 such sites in its first “Rise of the Newsbots” report, and another 125 sites “operating with little to no human oversight” in another report two weeks later. This rapid growth indicates that the “transformative technology is increasingly being used” to produce low-quality news and information sites, it warns.
“News consumers trust news sources less and less in part because of how hard it has become to tell a generally reliable source from a generally unreliable source,” says NewsGuard CEO Steven Brill. “This new wave of AI-created sites will only make it harder for consumers to know who is feeding them the news, further reducing trust.”
That’s bad news for the media and readers — especially if Carl Niehaus discovers ChatGPT.
*Shapshak is editor-in-chief of Stuff.co.za and publisher of Scrolla.Africa
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