Hours after Poynter published his advice on AI ethics, a virtually identical article appeared on an incomplete website. Probably written through an artificial intelligence.
The article, introduced to Tech Gate through a supposed human named Bourbiza Mohamed, who racks up signatures on stories about video games, Bitcoin, and NASA every five minutes or so, was published 4 hours after Poynter’s story. It had Poynter’s graphic design and logo and followed the same design as Kelly McBride’s article, but almost every single sentence rewritten with specific word choices.
For example, the Tech Gate article says:
“Think of it (sic) as a meal prep package. A lot of the paintings are already done, you still have to roll up your sleeves and make some (sic) paintings.
Compare this to McBride’s article:
“Think of it as a meal prep kit. Most of the paintings are already done, but we still want to roll up our sleeves and make some paintings.
Tech Gate’s about me page is confusing and doesn’t have any tactile information. He says the site was introduced in 2007, but the site’s first archive on the Wayback Machine dates back to 2015 and is written in Arabic.
Even an article on the moral use of AI is not immune to bad actors who will use generation unethically. In this case, you’re most likely stealing content for hassle-free ad revenue.
Tech Gate is a pink slime news site, masquerading as a news feed that is filled with low-quality news (usually no news) or AI-generated articles that can be used through political operatives to cover up opinion pieces.
Last year, I spoke with Charlie Melvin, editor of the Richmond Observer, who showed me a pink slime site that did the same thing for his organization’s local stories. He worried that, on a giant scale, AI would depreciate the price of original content, as it could have simply been plagiarized seamlessly on networks of dubious websites.
This episode highlights some of the demanding situations faced by the media. First: How can you compete with unethical media in the age of generative AI?And second: How can I manage my intellectual property?
While I can’t fully answer either, I can say that this curious case shows that AI will be used to feed the beast of online content, ethically or not. The only way to compete is to experiment and implement generative AI in your newsroom. . AI comes for your content and for this industry.
Hopefully, Poynter’s AI Ethics Consultant, not Tech Gate’s Dollar Store counterfeit, can expand your store’s resources to combat AI slime.