They are called Newsbot and it seems legitimate news sites – but almost all content is created by a software artificial intelligence. A new kind of “content farm” discovered by Newsguardwhich reports low-quality clickbait articles to maximize ad revenue.
Newsbot, the sites created by AI to fill us with clickbait
NewsGuard has discovered poor quality AI-created websites, which they publish clickbait articles to make money with advertising. These sites are the new generation of ‘content farm‘‘. NewsGuard found them in seven languages (Czech, Chinese, French, English, Portuguese, Tagalog and Thai). And reports that they look like regular news sites ma are written by language models that mimic humans.
The sites don’t say who they own and produce a lot of content on various topics. Politics, health, entertainment, finance and technology. Some articles contain false information. Most of the content has simple language and repeated sentences, typical of texts generated by artificial intelligence.
Many of these sites they have a lot of ads, which suggests that they were created to make money with auto ads. Which are run by algorithms and fund a large part of online media. A tactic similar to that of first content farms on the internet, made by people.
This phenomenon has become possible thanks to tools based on artificial intelligence more and more powerful that have been launched and made accessible to the public in recent months. The fear that these tools could be used to create newspapers that publish thousands of articles at low cost – once only imagined by media pundits – is now a reality.
NewsGuard contacted the sites, only 2 out of 29 confirmed to use AI. The others didn’t reply or don’t use valid emails. With little oversight and no human authors, these sites mostly produce clickbait. And they make it even more important to verify that the site you consult is trustworthy.