Don’t Blame AI. Plagiarism Is Turning Digital News into Hot Garbage | Hacker News Reader

Don’t Blame AI. Plagiarism Is Turning Digital News into Hot Garbage

scientificamerican.com

40 pointsBrajeshwar11 comments

Not sure people are reading the article, but the point being made is that “blaming AI” is just a smokescreen for a decades old problem that has been punted on for far too long.

If you have a problem with a more advanced tool doing plagiarism — simply because it does a better job, then your anger should be directed toward finding a solution. Less sophisticated technologies have already been doing this via “article spinners” for years. The problem has long been in our faces on popular websites, whether or not AI participated.

It's interesting to me that I've never noticed this kind of thing. I've certainly seen content mills that have underqualified barely college-age humans churning out noninformation by the hour with no time or budget to do any actual research or news collection, but this kind of blatantly obvious automated plagiarism platform that is serving up unreadable nonsense I've never seen. What can possibly be the play here? Nobody is going to read this. The only motivation I can even think of is a sufficiently enticing headline spammed into enough link aggregators may get people to click, and if you can serve them enough immediate annoyances they have to dismiss before they actually read anything, they may take a few seconds before closing the tab and that counts as an ad impression.

How can that possibly be a sustainable business model? For Microsoft of all companies? MSN is their official news platform, apparently synchronized with a Microsoft news app I didn't know existed, with tiles for the stories served into people's start menus if they use Windows. If anyone can pay an actual journalist, it's Microsoft. Why choose this route? Say what you will about Amazon, but the Washington Post still does actual investigative work and uncovers interesting facts and stories the world would not come to know about if not for their work. Why intentionally turn a news platform into shit when you're going to make more money than God either way?

If you’ve ever looked at ground news, I found the article timelines fascinating and somewhat shocking. It’s apparently the case that some most news orgs at very least, plagiarize each other endlessly — whether using people to rewrite original stories or using tech tools or some combination of them.

I would guess that in competing for your attention, they’re simply trying to prevent you from going to other places to read those stories.

Same. There was low-quality content out there before but it's now gone totally out of control.

It's ridiculous to not admit that LLMs are producing crap by the metric shitton.

AI is def increasing the ratio of bullshit to quality info but this shit has been around for a minute -> https://www.wyzowl.com/youtube-stats/#:~:text=How%20many%20v....

Aren't we still trying to understand where the training data for all of these AI models was sourced from? If it was data that was used without permission, wouldn't that be considered some form of IP theft and potentially plagiarism?

I fail to really see the nuance here. The news is hot garbage though, I agree with that. I however would make the assertion that greed and $$$ are the reasons the news has turned into hot poop rather than AI or plagiarism.

… Didn’t Digital News do that on their own? Their web reading experience is so fully slathered over with ads you cannot even tell when the paragraph ends, let alone the article.

But hey, a certain percentage of the population will click fucking anything, so lets optimize for that.

It’s one event. You only need one article to write about it. How do you put it into 800 different digital news media? That’s right, you need variations. 800 of them.

Why not both?

Title: "Don't Blame AI. Plagiarism is turning digital news into hot garbage".

Subtitle: "A botched obituary underlines threats from both artificial intelligence and digital plagiarism mills to pollute the news with misinformation"

So which one is it? Sounds to me like LLMs are used to do (very low quality) plagiarism. So "AI" is to blame after all.

Same difference. "AI" is just another form of plagiarism.

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