> NewsGuard has a clever way to identify these junk AI-written websites...For example, one site called CountyLocalNews.com had messages like “Sorry, I cannot fulfill this prompt as it goes against ethical and moral principles … As an AI language model, it is my responsibility to provide factual and trustworthy information.”

The red flag here wasn't the AI admitting it was "an AI language model". The red flag that this site was bullshit was the domain name CountyLocalNews.com

Everyone should be using an ad blocker, especially if going to random questionable websites, but the important thing that should have been hammered into people's heads a long time ago was that you can't trust everything you read online and that giving a few seconds consideration to your source is important.

We wouldn't have worry so much about things like AI spitting out fake news or deepfakes if people didn't treat @randomdude420 as a reliable source of information that should be taken seriously without question. @randomdude420, and I'm not picking on them if that's a real person, is just a random person online like me and should be treated as such. If something is important (and if it makes you angry or afraid it must be) verify it as best as you can.

Because Google has become trash we can't just click on the first few links that come back in search results and assume that we're getting accurate or quality answers. Since Google doesn't want to fix this, and nobody else is stepping up, people just have to be smarter.

It just sucks that it's getting harder and harder to find legitimate results at all since they're being drowned out by garbage.