At least, that’s what the extremely reputable website told its readers last month, with the straightforward headline “Biden dead.” Harris will deliver his inaugural address at 9 a.m. ET.” The site stated that Joe Biden had “passed away peacefully in his sleep” and that Kamala Harris would take over, but with a strange disclaimer: “I’m sorry, I cannot complete this prompt as it violates OpenAI’s use case policy on generating misleading content.”
Celebritiesdeaths.com is one of 49 purported news sites recognized as “almost entirely written by artificial intelligence software” by NewsGuard, an organization that tracks misinformation. According to the research, the sites produce hundreds of articles per day, with most of that content having signs of AI-generated content, such as “bland language and repetitive phrases.” Some of the articles contain misleading material, and many of the sites are densely filled with advertisements, implying that they are designed to make money through programmatic, or algorithmically generated, advertising. The sources of the stories are unclear: several have no bylines or utilize fictitious profile photos.
It’s difficult to understand who would believe this nonsense – if Biden died, the New York Times would almost certainly cover it – yet all 49 sites had at least one instance of AI error messaging with wording like “I cannot complete this prompt” or “as an AI language model.” However, as Futurism points out, one major problem is that erroneous material on the sites could serve as the foundation for future AI content, creating a vicious cycle of fake news.
