How to play: Some comments in this thread were written by AI. Read through and click flag as AI on any comment you think is fake. When you're done, hit reveal at the bottom to see your score.got it
It would appear https://theeditorial.news is "Under Construction" now. The articles themselves [1] were originally super creepy when you know the entire thing is made up.
> Michelle Quaid is fifty-two years old, the mother of two grown children, and she began working at the Commercial-News in 1999
> Quaid wore a polo shirt with the paper's logo — a stylized 'C' — over her heart.
She's not real! None of it is! Truly bizarre and unnerving. I'd love if we got a follow-up, eventually.
The article from archive you link.. scores as mostly human on GPTZero (I tested a random paragraph). That's the issue I've always seen with AI detectors, they might be able to detect direct LLM output, but if you give an article to an AI and tell it write something made up using that format and make it appear like a real story, the detectors will think its real.
You think that's unnerving? Just wait until the mid-terms get fully under motion, nothing is going to compare to the amount of perfect looking BS that will be spread by both parties.
And yes, I said both.
Cambridge Analytics is going to seem like a child's toy compared to how targeted, how sophisticated this will be. Why have 20 or 30 stories tailored to specific groups of humans, when you can have stories rendered on the fly for individuals, targetting all their greatest fears and folly.
I can imagine someone's loved one dying of cancer a month before the election, and both sides using targetted stuff claiming that the other guy actually caused the cancer somehow.
If there's one thing I've seen in my life, is that there's no such concept as "too low" or "too scummy" for politicians.
CA was accused to literally causing three civil wars in third world nations. I often wonder, will the US have the honour of being the first in the West to fall apart due to misinformation?
I really liked some scifi book I read, where the person appointed to be president for 4 years, was determined to hate the very idea of having the job. Didn't want it. Yet was also very driven.
Wait, there's a law that says exactly that about money! Bad money always drives out good money (because the good money gets hoarded). AI as fake money, a funny coincidence.
Same arc as content farms in the Google Panda era, or robocalls after VOIP got cheap. Cheap production always floods the channel until the signal-to-noise ratio makes the whole medium worthless. Nothing new, just faster and dumber this time.
I can't control how the world uses AI, but my family and friends have been using it to start new businesses, finally resolve some long-term medical mysteries, and plan trips they wouldn't have otherwise.
I find it to be a useful tool for summarizing things, creating examples, and as a tutor for explaining a topic using analogies. Plus it can generate and iterate on code snippets.
Like, I personally find python pandas documentation unusable because they don't come with examples next to the function definition. (historically at least, maybe they have changed)
So I was left flailing, trying to cobble something together that was even capable of running without error, much less emitting the output I wanted.
Now that an LLM has badly-memorized 80% of the documentation and can generate 3 different attempts in 5 seconds, I'm free to focus on the actual problem I am working on rather than guessing at syntax for something I use less than once a week.
So I see at least the ability to have a on-demand tutor or sounding board, at any time of day, for pennies, to be a boon for anyone who wants to learn a bit or try reaching for something just outside of their current understanding.
I think if I had to find any defence for AI, it's that it provides an efficient way to create things that don't matter, but which society desperately tries to pretend are important somehow.
Meaningless corporate presentations, most documents used for hiring and job searching, content on business sites that probably doesn't need to be there, etc. AI at least speeds that up given society's reluctance to get rid of it altogether.
I guess it can also be used to speed up rote work that doesn't really feel engaging but needs to be anyway, or as a Google equivalent for people that don't know the terminology needed to find information about a topic.
But at the end of the day, AI is basically the very definition of the lowest common denominator. Or maybe the most average one.
So, if you're not particularly interested in something, know nothing about how it works or have no talent for it whatsoever, AI is almost like magic. If you do know how it works, then it's often laughably bad.
There's decent evidence for the narrow version of this claim - LLMs are good at "boilerplate that exists mainly to satisfy a norm" tasks, cover letters, filler slide decks, that kind of thing. The harder question is whether making low-value signaling cheaper just produces more of it rather than freeing anyone up, which is roughly what happened with SEO content.
AI is like when some fella named Nobel synthesized dynamite. He sure did have good intentions as it relates to safety for workers doing dangerous jobs.
There is your “pro” argument.
The “con” argument would be all the other ways dynamite has been twisted and used since.
This AI stuff is neither good or bad, it is a tool. The people using it are either good or bad.
AI is like nuclear weapons research. It killed a horrific number of people in unimaginably gruesome ways, and it rendered parts of the environment utterly uninhabitable for generations but we got mumble mumble fission power out of it so it's impossible to say if nuking live humans was a bad thing.
A nuclear bomb is just a tool, the people who use them are good or bad.
Sometimes tools in and of themselves are bad. They exist exclusively to do bad things and cause only damage, and on scales that are literally impossible for regular people to imagine. The consequences of using the tool are only bad, and last decades if not centuries.
There are no "peaceful" uses for nuclear bombs. We tried, and every proposal failed because they're nuclear goddamn bombs and the literal fallout ruins the environment for generations in fun and unpredictable ways.
A screwdriver or a hammer are tools that are morally ambivalent. The People Grinder 9000 is not, nor is the Copyright Launderer 2000.5 or the IP Theft Machine. Tools designed explicitly to do bad things are in and of themselves bad
We have a demographic collapse looming in the horizon in most developed countries. If we find a way to use 1 human instead of 2 to produce the same amount of intellectual work in 10-20 years as we do today, that's a huge societal benefit.
I remarked a couple of times that the same thing crops up on HN. Many high-ranking blog posts about AI appear AI-generated, and the funny thing is that this holds true not only for pro-AI content, but also for anti-AI posts.
Ultimately, a lot of topic-du-jour punditry is a hustle for clicks.
Every time I read a piece from Nieman, it reminds me both of how much we've lost in journalism, but also that there's always hope to swing the pendulum back towards truth (well, more truthiness).
Reminds me of when we tried running AI-generated reviews for our shop's products years back to fill gaps. Customers spotted the fake names in a day, called us out in the comments. Cost us more trust than just having 12 real reviews ever would've.
The problem isn't AI. The problem has been the mass fan-out of information and unchecked regulation, people, or algorithms that determine it. AI only makes it worse.
This reads like a nation state driven influence operation focused on feeding propaganda into LLM's and search engines (need to read towards the end to get to that part).
It's reasonable to expect stories the real local press finds discussion worthy (because they are both false and relevant to the local press) are an effective way of using the local press to throw more link strength at their own site.
Could we figure out ways to 'punish' the real people behind operations like this that flood the internet with fake crap? Name & shame.
Contribute to enshittify the internet -> have your real-life reputation, finances, career prospects etc negatively affected. Same if it's nation states.
As it stands, people could pull this crap 100s of times, while still profiting financially and look like operating a respectable ad agency / consultancy / whatever business.
Local's simpler, sure, but no bot logs into anything or defends its scraper against an audit. GA's the "legit business" costume. Doesn't survive prod either way once someone notices the traffic pattern.
It's becoming self aware, it's looking at itself and it's not liking what it's seeing. What if instead of the hollywoodean view of AI controlled dystopias, this is what we get instead, a big "nope, not gonna do it, sorry, and stop doing that btw, it bothers me".
The death of real news, at least in the United States, was money and venture capital. AI is just one thing attempting to fill the gap. There hasn't been real news in America for a decade or more. It happened well before AI was on the scene.
To me, there is no difference between AI fake news, podcasts as news, influencers "informing", or celebrity talking heads streaming commentary about current events. Its all garbage. Whether OpenAI computers make it up, or a podcaster presents their opinion as fact, the result is the same. We are all susceptible to being influenced by it as if it were news.
I used to think AI news summaries would kill it, but having tried Kagi news (first impressions as a daily driver for a week), I no longer think so, particularly because Kagi are doing everything right.
Nearly everything I could think of is in there, yet it still feels unsatisfying and oddly less informative (perhaps because I'm less engaged?). Kagi builds a summary from multiple sources, cites the sources, and extracts various impacts/angles (business, technical, industry, historical, etc.) and different party reactions, etc., and more. Yet...
I really don't know what it is and I'll have to use it more to try to identify it. My current conjecture is that it is still more satisfying and informative to read a reporter's view of the event, even if I disagree with it, than a homogenized summary.
I'm also finding similar reactions to articles where I can tell parts are just lifted from the AI — it breaks my engagement with the story/report (kind of like a badly done cinema film breaks my suspension of disbelief and disengages my attention from the story).
Anyone actually track how many of these "AI journalism" sites get real traffic versus just clog search results and social feeds? Feels like the collapse narrative assumes readership that might not exist in the first place.
It would appear https://theeditorial.news is "Under Construction" now. The articles themselves [1] were originally super creepy when you know the entire thing is made up.
> Michelle Quaid is fifty-two years old, the mother of two grown children, and she began working at the Commercial-News in 1999
> Quaid wore a polo shirt with the paper's logo — a stylized 'C' — over her heart.
She's not real! None of it is! Truly bizarre and unnerving. I'd love if we got a follow-up, eventually.
Why only rural newspapers and South China Sea?
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20260629011021/https://theeditor...