[HN Gopher] MSN replaced journalists with AI publishing fake new...
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MSN replaced journalists with AI publishing fake news about
mermaids and Bigfoot
Author : cpeterso
Score : 106 points
Date : 2022-12-03 20:00 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (futurism.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (futurism.com)
| civilized wrote:
| I'm confused about what "the rules" are for fake news. Once we a
| week we go to the supermarket, and lining the checkout aisle we
| see tabloids peddling what seem to be obviously false celebrity
| gossip stories, but presented as news. This has been going on for
| as long as I can remember - so, at least 30 years.
|
| I guess we're supposed to be alarmed here because MSN was once
| not a tabloid? Not that I would know, I've never read it.
| kodah wrote:
| Tabloids are not different than much of the shitposting some
| people do on the internet. They'll take one small truth and
| extrapolate it into an entire learned lesson based on smoke and
| mirrors. The gossip end is just kind of gross to me, but I'm
| already the kind of person that doesn't hang out with people
| that tend to gossip.
| bombcar wrote:
| Amusingly enough if you actually _read_ the tabloids (or at
| least decades ago this was true) they often were just reprints
| of actual small-time news stories; the tabloids basically made
| the front cover out of "Bob in Bobville said what his brother
| done got et by a hornytoad".
| truculent wrote:
| IIRC the original term was coined for a specific type of
| misinformation where the aim is to erode trust in institutions
| and truth in general by bombarding people with incorrect news
| (kind of like a DDoS on truth). This is differentiated from
| salacious tabloid gossip or from propaganda (which seeks to
| push a specific, alternative truth).
|
| However, now the vernacular use seems to be totally
| undifferentiated, yes.
| spookie wrote:
| Disinformation can go hand and hand with propaganda, look at
| the current European war. I get what you're saying, but just
| pointing out that it can be used in detriment to the morale
| on the other side of the fence.
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| Yes? It is the steady and constant decline and spread that is
| the problem.
| civilized wrote:
| I tend to agree, just thinking out loud.
|
| Filling grandma's trusted news page with nonsense is elder
| abuse, and could be much worse if they hit her with, say,
| antivax conspiracies at the right time.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| I don't see what the specificity is very relevant.
| Declining quality of reporting hurts everyone, grandma and
| kids and geniuses and morons all.
| civilized wrote:
| It's relevant because we can't imagine the impact on
| everyone. If we try, we simply imagine ourselves.
|
| I certainly agree that grandma is not the only kind of
| person who could be harmed by this.
| bawolff wrote:
| Its hardly steady and constant. There is a recent spike, but
| "yellow" journalism was a really big thing historically.
| MintsJohn wrote:
| Gossip is presented as gossip, fake news a news (or in this
| case facts).
|
| (I read the article twice, the website being unknown to me I
| thought it was fake news, and it still seems weird to me that
| MSN uses AI generated content, otoh why not, the mess MSN
| forces on me in windows has been distopian for years, and the
| mentioned article appears on MSN. Sad times that these days I'm
| sceptical of anything. I honestly feel this is one of the
| biggest dangers of our times, the ease with which populations
| can be influenced and truth is just a matter of alternative
| facts, the common argument is that it is of all times but that
| neglects how much easier, more sophisticated, and larger the
| reach is)
| fjsofkjdsfkos wrote:
| If there's any doubt about the authenticity of Futurism, you
| can click through and read the MSN "articles" for yourself.
| It's definitely real!
|
| I do think there's some confusion here over exactly what's
| happening. MSN's AI isn't generating entire articles like
| GPT-3; it's just using AI to curate articles for
| republication from across the web, but accidentally (or
| perhaps intentionally, in a sort of wink-wink situation for
| clickbait traffic) selecting ones that are clearly fake news
| (including literal stuff about mermaids and bigfoot.)
| MintsJohn wrote:
| Ah yes, with all the GPT3 news I thought MSN was using it.
| Thank for correcting that assumption. Doesn't make the
| situation any better of course, it's just that MSN
| forwarding anything unfortunately is no news to me.
| toldyouso2022 wrote:
| Fake news are good for society because it forces people to
| triple check when they wanna know something. Not all people
| will triple check everything, but it's better than a society of
| people believing whatever comes from authority.
|
| Also censorship is bad and all that.
|
| Thank you fake news!
| system2 wrote:
| Unfortunately people are not as evolved as you think. They
| still believe fake news.
| blooalien wrote:
| Worse than just believing it ... these days they can
| (nearly) instantaneously share it to zillions of other
| people around the world many of whom will _also_ believe
| (and re-share) it, and few in that chain will bother to
| fact-check it themselves, and of those few, even _fewer_
| will take the time to call out the error / misinformation,
| and even if they do, they'll almost instantly be shouted
| down and ridiculed by all those who just outright _refuse_
| to see facts when they really _really want_ to believe a
| lie. This of course leads the average "volunteer" fact-
| checker to just sooner or later give up even _trying_ to
| fight the growing waves of "fake news", and keep their
| fact-checking to themselves; Not good for _anyone._
| DemocracyFTW2 wrote:
| Some people have been alarmed about this and did drag
| publishers to the courts over fake news parading as truth for
| much longer than three decades. That it has been having a
| constant presence for as long as you can think and doesn't do
| harm to you personally doesn't mean it's not a societal
| problem. Car exhausts haven't killed you in the past and have
| been around for ages, so... more car exhausts should be no
| problem, no? Especially when I choose to ignore them?
| civilized wrote:
| My comment is directed at our confusing historical norms.
| Personally I would be happy if all this nonsense would go
| away. Not quite sure what can be done about it though.
|
| Seems like it would be good to have more nonprofit news
| organizations with credible dedication to integrity.
| [deleted]
| hanafudafan wrote:
| I'd rather have machines writing fake news than humans,
| personally.
| nmz wrote:
| This doesn't seem like a credible news source.
| bhawks wrote:
| Last week YouTuber Allen Pan launched Canadian United Media in
| response to CNN using one of his previous videos unattributed on
| their platforms. The site is all AI generated from a model
| trained on CNN content. Funny to see MSN putting another Allen
| Pan idea in to practice.
|
| https://youtu.be/lCSrN-e_dkE
|
| https://canadian-united.media/
| Aeolun wrote:
| Ah yes, I can see how someone could mistake this for a real
| news article: https://canadian-united.media/2022/12/03/your-
| guide-to-findi...
| dpflan wrote:
| Excellent, indeed, this will happen more and more, completely
| made up infinite content that seems very real, news site,
| entire functioning social graphs/networks with believable
| characters...
| djkivi wrote:
| CUM?
| dpflan wrote:
| Were the main images for each article generated by AI too? They
| are pretty funky, especially the "Fishermen Catch Mermaid
| Creature in Their Nets" (https://www.msn.com/en-
| us/news/technology/fishermen-catch-me...).
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| duxup wrote:
| I always assumed this was happening to an extent already,
| particularly with sports. In the sports news world you get all
| sorts of "season previews" and various articles with "each team's
| strength's and weaknesses".
|
| If you weren't a fan of big name teams you'd inevitably find with
| your team: coaches mentioned who weren't there anymore, players
| who weren't there anymore, and various outdated factoids /
| concerns thrown in. Some "concerns" almost felt like an AI
| trained on fan forums where issues fans had, but had no place in
| reality were raised, with even local fan forum lingo tossed in
| ...
|
| If it was a person, or a script that generated content that got
| doctored by a person I don't know, but the patter was very clear.
| awillen wrote:
| That sounds like it's roughly on the level of Steven A. Smith.
| wellthatsawrap1 wrote:
| trident1000 wrote:
| baxtr wrote:
| What Intel are you referring to?
| CrazyPyroLinux wrote:
| Probably
| https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598822959866683394
| trident5000 wrote:
| I think hes talking about a thread on Twitter where it was
| exposed the Biden admin was working with Twitter employees to
| take down content for political reasons.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| That's one way of stating it.
|
| Another would be that people associated with the private
| citizen Biden requested that Twitter review tweets that
| were against the tos. Those tweets appear to be revenge
| porn. Twitter took down some.
| deadly_syn wrote:
| Can you really consider someone who has held public
| office for that long (or their immediate family) as a
| private citizen? Even if you were friends with the biden
| family before they had any political power, would you not
| prioritize what they ask of you after they gained that
| power? People like having famous and powerful friends
| usually and will go out of their way to keep them.
| [deleted]
| nickthegreek wrote:
| Well it sounds like the argument you want to make is that
| it's wrong if the people in power request Twitter to
| enforce their tos on specific tweets? If so, it might
| interest you to know that the actual administration in
| charge at the time also requested tweets to be removed
| for tos violations and those some of those were honored
| too.
|
| If anything, I believe, in the interest of tranparency,
| Twitter should make all such requests from governments
| available to the public moving forward.
| [deleted]
| trident5000 wrote:
| ok123456 wrote:
| Did anyone notice?
| muststopmyths wrote:
| What a sad shitshow. News used to be a really good app on windows
| phone.
| [deleted]
| fjsofkjdsfkos wrote:
| I think people are somewhat misunderstanding what's going on in
| this story. MSN's AI isn't generating stories wholesale like
| GPT-3 -- it's selecting other publications' stories from across
| the web for syndication, but doing it automatically after the
| company fired the team previously responsible for that curation
| process in 2020. Unfortunately, this new system is clearly not
| exercising good judgment about what articles or publications are
| credible, because of the ridiculous stuff that it's republishing
| from fake news sites about bigfoot, mermaids, monsters on Mars
| etc.
| [deleted]
| heather45879 wrote:
| I'd like to point out this extends to the actual Windows 11 OS
| because they relentlessly push National-Enquirer calibre news
| to users. Want to get something done? Hit Windows key and start
| searching for that app you want to use--only to be force-fed a
| bunch of celebrity gossip because it prefix-matches the search
| term and they want to sell Ad impressions.
|
| I used to have high hopes for some of Microsoft's innovations
| like Zune, Windows Phone, connect, Rosalyn--that glimmer of
| open-source-hope from the Evil Empire.
|
| But it's obvious now they are not really good at anything in
| the consumer space anymore: Hopping on the ad bandwagon because
| that's what Google does; stealing the OS X taskbar placement
| for no good reason; turning the OS into the spyware folks used
| to dread at the turn of the millennium; now we need apps to
| remove Windows features just to use our computers.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Oddly enough the thing driving more advanced users to linux
| now isn't that Linux is so good. It's that MS and Windows are
| so bad.
| DemocracyFTW2 wrote:
| Funny how these days everybody seems to think that the world
| should be run without anybody else.
| this_steve_j wrote:
| I would classify this sort of info-entertainment masquerading as
| journalism as "zombie news" or perhaps "garbage pail news".
|
| It lacks a sufficiently insidious motive to be considered "fake"
| news, although an argument could be made that it erodes trust in
| traditional media outlets when a publication with significant
| reach goes fallow.
|
| It has all the trappings of a media outlet but none of the
| editorial brains.
| musicale wrote:
| After two years of pandemic/polarization/climate
| disaster/war/recession/etc. doom and gloom I'm kind of ready for
| some reporting on mermaids and Bigfoot.
|
| Maybe they should bring back the print edition of the Weekly
| World News.
|
| MSN might also consider adding The Onion since it seems about as
| accurate as many published news sources.
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(page generated 2022-12-03 23:00 UTC)