Is Google paying your newspaper to use ’AI’?

A tranche of roboguff exploiting a writer's name

GOOGLE is paying newspaper publishers to test an "Artificial Intelligence" story-generating system, Mark Stenberg reported in AdWeek on 27 February. The publishers are, he writes, "expected to use the suite of tools to produce a fixed volume of content for 12 months. In return, the news outlets receive a monthly stipend amounting to a five-figure sum annually, as well as the means to produce content relevant to their readership at no cost."

Google issued a statement: "The experimental tool is being responsibly designed to help small, local publishers produce high quality journalism using factual content from public data sources - like a local government’s public information office or health authority. These tools are not intended to, and cannot, replace the essential role journalists have in reporting, creating and fact-checking their articles."

Stenberg does not report what news publishers are using the tool. The Freelance would of course welcome news on this.

The publishers feed the tool with a list of websites to draw on - for example government statements or press releases. The tool then boils these down into news stories, highlighting the direct quotes and the parts it made up. The theory is that an editor meticulously reviews and fact-checks this before publication. The Freelance would also appreciate reports on how prone this tool is to confabulation.

Silliness galore

Meanwhile the market in self-published e-books on Amazon.com is flooded with hopeful monsters. As one example, Ethan Mollick, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton Business School, reports finding "an unauthorized biography that is 100% made up AI stuff: 118 pages of looping & repeating vagueness without any true facts". He deduces that the culprit used his official Wharton biography as a prompt for this robography.

More alarmingly for journalists, games writer Kyle Russell reports finding roboguff submitted over his name to USA Today and the Detroit Free Press. He posted a link to his page on MuckRack - and that site promptly removed the articles.

At least one new piece then appeared over Kyle's name - fittingly, a bunch of empty words about the empty promise of "NFTs", labelled as "contributor content" which we take to mean advertorial. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel seems to have taken it down. But since AI-generated copy does not belong to anyone we feel justified in offering you a link to the horror-show of "Stepping Into the NFT Frontier: Where Creativity Meets Innovation" through the otherwise dodgy archive.ph site.

The Freelance will try to explore wit Kyle Russell whether he wants to try out the very special UK law allowing people who have others' work falsely attributed to them to sue over here. And then there's the law on defamation...

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