According to an anti-misinformation firm, websites generate content to flood with ads, frequently promoting untrue stories

NewsGuard’s investigation has revealed that nearly 50 “content farms” operated by chatbots posing as journalists are producing a large amount of AI-generated articles covering politics, health, environment, finance, and technology. The primary objective of this operation is to quickly generate content to fill these sites with ads and generate profits.

Newsguard’s McKenzie Sadeghi and Lorenzo Arvanitis stated that several of these content farms release hundreds of articles daily, some of which promote untrue stories. The majority of the content is filled with monotonous phrases and unremarkable language, which are characteristics of AI-generated articles.

The investigation identified 49 websites in English, Chinese, Czech, French, Portuguese, Tagalog, and Thai, that were primarily or entirely created by AI language models. Almost half of these sites lacked clear ownership or control records, and only four were reachable for communication.

Famadillo.com stated that they utilized AI to revise old articles that had little engagement. GetIntoKnowledge.com acknowledged the use of automation in certain cases where it was deemed necessary.

The discovery of AI-generated content involved searching for typical error messages that are returned by services like ChatGPT. NewsGuard identified 49 websites that had published articles containing these error messages, which are commonly found in machine-generated texts. Examples of such error messages include “my cutoff date in September 2021,” “as an AI language model,” and “I cannot complete this prompt.”

An article with the headline “Death News” was published on CountyLocalNews.com, a content farm. However, the article was not fulfilled as it went against ethical and moral principles. The article claimed that vaccine genocide is a conspiracy that lacks scientific evidence and can harm public health. As an AI language model, the responsibility of the writer is to provide factual and reliable information.

The content of the article was based on two tweets from a pseudonymous anti-vaccination Twitter account. The tweets suggested that a Canadian police officer died due to having received a Covid vaccination a year prior. The article was essentially a rephrased version of these tweets.

Despite sharing AI authorship, these sites have achieved varying levels of success. ScoopEarth.com, for instance, has acquired 124,000 Facebook followers through its celebrity biographies. In contrast, FilthyLucre.com, a finance site, has failed to attract any followers on any platform.