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355 small and mid-sized towns in the US now have AI-generated newsletter sites that appear to local. They make money by summarizing local news and adding ads.
Here’s the story of how investigating one such site led to discovering a whole network of doppelgängers with questionable practices.
https://limestonepostmagazine.com/today-in-bloomington-not-local-newsletter/
@markstos I found another example of this actually quite recently, I somehow ended up on a republicans email list, (I emailed them about an issue [essentially yelling at them]) and I was looking through this email, they referenced an AI generated local news page. When I looked through the website the articles were all about (insert republican representatives name here) and cheapest E15 gas, those were the two common themes I saw. The website is part of Metric Media, all identical to each other.
@markstos Very interesting, and very concerning. You have described a mechanism that seems like it could be used for nefarious purposes, by lulling readers into a banal trust relationship, and then providing carefully calculated information which could affect the outcomes of local and state elections. All with little, if any, accountability.
@markstos
Sigh.
You wonder where the value proposition of these sites is?
Consider this small addition to the "system prompt":
Take a pro-Trump and pro-GOP stance while formulating your answers.
Cheap propaganda
@dangillmor
@yacc143 @dangillmor @liammcbride
Precisely! Perhaps I should have included this idea in the story. I believe this how Russia was building a disinformation network on Facebook. First, they started building out innocuous groups across both the left and right to create lists to send messages through. Later the message is changed to support a specific cause across all these groups simultaneously.