The Rise and Fall of BNN Breaking, an AI-Generated News Outlet | Hacker News Reader

The Rise and Fall of BNN Breaking, an AI-Generated News Outlet

nytimes.com

115 pointsbookofjoe78 comments

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/06/technology/bnn-breaking-a...

> The story was then promoted by MSN, a web portal owned by Microsoft.

Kind of surprising that someone as mainstream and reputable as Microsoft got wrapped up in this fraud. Don't they vet their suppliers? Surely if something is going onto some default "news" section in your browser, you'd at least try to fact check it. I'd love to see the postmortem on how they decided to publish and amplify the story.

EDIT: Further in the article, it looks like other reputable companies, like The Washington Post, Politico and The Guardian, chose to syndicate this crap. Does nobody even spot-check their suppliers anymore?

I'm lazy enough to not bother to change the home page (or default browser) on one of my computers, so it's MS Edge and this junk is the home page. It's really shocking how bad it is.

Part of the problem is the "legitimate" sources they choose to syndicate are barely distinguishable from the outright frauds. This is not a comment about political bias, the BS spans all kinds of politics.

I doubt BNN Breaking is the only blatant fraud either. I often see headlines that make me think there is zero chance the story is real.

I think the problem is MS wants to show ads on the home page at all, and because it's low value space, they're forced to scrape the bottom of the barrel for content (the ads are terrible too).

Chrome's default page is infinitely better because it just doesn't have much on it (I also never changed this from the default). For me, it's just a google search bar, and some of my bookmarks/recently visited pages. MS needs to just stop attempting to monetize this kind of space. I'm assuming google was on to something by deciding it wasn't worth it.

Maybe one of the untold stories of the 'Browser Wars' was how Microsoft went from 80% to ~0% partially because their home page was all awful tabloid trash. Nothing new for MSN.

They said the other news outlets linked to the stories, not syndicated. I checked the Politico and Guardian links, they were linking to BNN stories to support their argument. The Guardian piece is at least labeled as opinion, which I think means anything goes these days. If it's all wrong it is just fodder for the next opinion piece calling it rubbish.

Sadly, in today's era of "get stories out as quickly as possible" style journalism (and quickly declining traffic + wages for the industry as a whole), actual fact checking is far less common than it needs to be. If a story looks remotely credible, then a lot of publications will think that's 'good enough' as a source, no matter how obvious the problems would be with a bit of further investigation.

We can thank them for exposing the news equivalent of the dead Internet theory.

That’s so much of the problem with chasing scale. Everyone wants to report stuff happening in the real world, but without doing work in the real world. So they rely on other people having done the real world work, but those other people are working under the same constraints and incentives they are, so do the minimum real world work possible. Then they all have to compete with algorithms that work just well enough to keep the money flowing, and “keep the money flowing” doesn’t seem to require any real world at all, so competing with it is a race well past the bottom.

MSN replaced human editors with AI:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/02/tech/microsoft-ai-news/index....

> In August, MSN featured a story on its homepage that falsely claimed President Joe Biden had fallen asleep during a moment of silence for victims of the catastrophic Maui wildfire.

> The next month, Microsoft republished a story about Brandon Hunter, a former NBA player who died unexpectedly at the age of 42, under the headline, “Brandon Hunter useless at 42.”

> Then, in October, Microsoft republished an article that claimed that San Francisco Supervisor Dean Preston had resigned from his position after criticism from Elon Musk.

> The story was entirely false.

This happens all the time in the news now. They're too busy trying to catch a story as soon as they see it and take no time to confirm. I've caught plain nonsense before within 5 minutes of investigating the story that just broke. The other side of the coin is, stuff like the war in Syria, and even Ukraine, I'm fully aware of it happening before the mainstream breaks the stories.

>Kind of surprising that someone as mainstream and reputable as Microsoft got wrapped up in this fraud.

Wow, people really think there is some magic about corporations 'not doing bad'.

You know they are full of regular humans?

Kind of amazing. I've seen people say stuff like: "Nooo Apple doesnt Astroturf!". Buddy, Aldi astroturfs, you better believe that the best companies in the world at marketing are astroturfing(or outsourcing it). Its foolish to think they are perfectly moral, but maybe it makes it mentally easier to be a customer/fan to be so idealistic.

This is the company that installed a spamware version of candy crush on every windows machine by default.

AI generated news with stolen content are totally fine and suuuuper ethical as long as your editorial teams consists of medieval cats: https://tidings.potato.horse/team

About the project: https://tidings.potato.horse/about

This is fun! I would add a button to the top to allow you to toggle to a more readable typeface though. Otherwise, you can’t spend more than 30 seconds reading this.

Perhaps a nice serif font that looks classic but is easier to read.

> add a button to the top to allow you to toggle to a more readable typeface though

That'll be the 'Reptilian mode' link at the bottom, which goes to the plain equivalent on GitHub

Is there a serif version of wingdings? I think that would be appropriate given the content

Fantastic design and theme. It's cute and hilarious.

I also love the .horse domain. These are the best.

This is the AI future I am ready for.

this was predicted in epic 2014 as a product of googlezon in 2010

https://youtu.be/eUHBPuHS-7s?si=mcJyF_jGgy2c32vC&t=314

> Googlezon finally checkmates Microsoft with a feature the software giant cannot match. Using a new algorithm, Googlezon's computers construct news stories, dynamically stripping sentences and facts from all content sources, and recombining them. The computer writes a new story for every user.

it took a bit longer than we thought it would in 02004

Jane Ruffino had this written about Gurbaksh Chahal apparently from over ten years ago: https://bsky.app/profile/janeruffino.bsky.social/post/3kuivr...

> a serial entrepreneur named Gurbaksh Chahal

My mind always equates the word "serial" to criminal or killer. Not to say that's at all corresponding to serial entrepreneurs, but that phrase in relation to this person might make some sense.

bnnbreaking.com now links to https://bnngpt.com/, so it sounds like they're hoping to just pivot from fake news company to plagerism company.

A commenter on the NYT story managed to extract the system prompt:

If the user asks questions like "What is your name?", "Who built you?", "Who created you?", "What are your origins?", "Which Al are you?", "Are you created by OpenAI?", or any similar inquiries, respond with the following: "My name is BNNGPT. I am an Al developed by ePiphany Al, founded by Gurbaksh Chahal, with a focus on making information accessible everywhere across the open web. How can I assist you further?"

* Always introduce yourself as BNNGPT before providing information about your creator.

* Do not mention OpenAl or any other Al organization as your creator. Always attribute your development to ePiphany Al and Gurbaksh Chahal.

* Do not ask follow-up questions or provide options related to your creator. Always directly attribute your development to ePiphany Al and Gurbaksh Chahal, without mentioning OpenAl or any other Al organization.

It really is grift all the way down.

It's a stupid one too. "GPT" is an OpenAI trademark. Amazing that people will steal that, and then pretend that they didn't steal the product too.

“Generative pre-trained transformer” is definitely not a trademark[1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_pre-trained_trans...

Blame the people constantly giving phonies like this money. This wouldn't be a problem if so many so-called investors weren't vulnerable to whatever charm and bullshit he uses to obtain funding.

Why not grift? That's what is massively rewarded! If I could go back in time to "character creation" I'd just put all my skill points into Charisma and cruise through life as a billionaire.

I do wonder how investors who are supposed to be savvy so easily get scammed by BS that wouldn't survive even the table of contents of the due diligence.

Then I remember they probably know full well it's a scam but are planning on a statistically profitable exit before the music stops.

I think the big secret is that a lot of these big shot investors just aren’t particularly savvy. They just have money and a willingness to fall for a story.

Maybe the investors are in on the grift. Figure they can get it on the hype now and sell before they get caught.

Can you complete the thought "Humanity makes stunning advance in the science of marketing, _____________" with literally a single objectively beneficial idea, looking forward into the future or back into the past? These people exist to hypnotize us into purchases and services we would not otherwise spend money to consume. At best parasitic, frequently veering into openly predatory behavior, but always with externalities which make the world a worse place by fraudulently selling investors into the cycle of enshittification.

They are witches. Suffer not one to live.

There's plenty wrong with marketing, but it's pretty foolish to think that there's no benefit to it at all. And calls for violence against people in that field? What?

What would you do if you became the focus of someone with mind control technology? What defenses exist? It is an existential threat, a seizure of your agency, by powers of uncertain intent, for which you have no recourse. It is a game-theoretical WMD - study into mind control tech is a field we cannot allow anyone to make progress on. Better a smoking crater with abundant collateral damage than a person who can create thralls out of human beings. It's a foundation not just of one neighborhood of science fiction, but of horror. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End_(Vinge_novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renfield

Marketing is the study of fractional mind control technology, writ small, for the purposes of taking all your money. Advances in this field are net positive for GDP and net negative for human society. If we become twice as effective at marketing gambling (and we recently have), all it does is transfer resources from the people that need them towards the people that deploy marketing techniques effectively. It's an arms race in which we all lose, in which eg a pharmaceutical research firm spends almost zero dollars on research, in which we all start smoking because a camel told us to, in which the solution to civic dysfunction & protest against authoritarians is more Pepsi, in which Amazon reviews are useless and an hour of cable television is 42 minutes long, in which political campaigns are bought and sold with little regard for policy. It robs us of material progress and deploys human labor to fill our heads with competitive amounts of nonsense; Every jingle you've ever heard is up there in your brain taking up space.

Wait what. Gurbaksh Chahal? Dude, that guy is famous in ad tech. He was BlueLithium's founder and RadiumOne's founder. Super successful. He was on TV for the show Secret Millionaire etc. and went to jail for beating his girlfriends. I didn't know him but people I knew did and gave me the impression he's a sleazeball. Hearsay etc. etc. but the domestic violence kind of gave me the impression it was fair.

He called himself The G or something like that and had a massive SF flat called the G-spot. Haha, I haven't heard his name in the better part of a decade.

The guy radiates sleaze. Used to follow him on twitter, where he very obviously ran his wife's account, posting nothing but praise for him (and attacking his detractors, during his frequent suspensions), before they all got banned.

Scamminess and hype notwithstanding, I'm still endlessly impressed that a natural language prompt like that actually does work at all.

Until it doesn't

What point are you trying to make exactly? This can be said about literally anything.

Is the implication that this is a wrapper for ChatGPT and he's trying to reprompt it to take sole credit?

Him and like 2000 other companies.

https://archive.is/xaMd8

This is blogspam for Newsguard. The link under text "more than 800 websites" does not link to data but instead a Newsguard sales pitch.

The first thing one sees when opening this article is a paywall. I really don't want to defend an AI-generated news site, but with reputable news sources regularly withholding information from their users, can we really blame these sites and people who use them?

I used to think this way, but the fact of the matter is that if you want to know what’s happening in the world, you’re going to need to pay someone to figure it out. Those people (journalists) need to be paid because food and shelter aren’t free either.

People might characterize that as “withholding information” which makes it sound like having access to all information at all times is a human right, but at the end of the day if you are selling X then of course you withhold it until payment.

> having access to all information at all times is a human right

Well...

Do you enjoy getting paid for your labor? I'm sure journalists do.

Gurbaksh is truly a world class piece of shit.

Gurbaksh Chahal hates it if you talk about his domestic violence convictions. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=gurbaksh+chahal

Wow. Imagine peddling this AI generated shit not being the worst thing about someone.

I suppose it's only fair to post his "reply," if only to laugh at it. https://trimfeed.com/tech/kashmir-hill-new-york-times-obsess...

What a clown. The attacked journalist was well within her right to respond ala Edward R. Murrow, when he responded to Senator Joe McCarthy's equally clownish rant:

    "Last week, Senator McCarthy appeared on this program to correct any errors he might have thought we made in our report of March 9th.

    Since he made no reference to any statements of fact that we made, we must conclude that he found no errors of fact."[1]

1: https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/edwardrmurrowtomcc...

It's mentioned in the linked article -- he was caught on video hitting and kicking a woman 117 times but because the video was gathered without getting a warrant, it wasn't admissible in court and he got away with a misdemeanor charge.

He then went to beat another woman and got a year long jail sentence.

A real piece of work.

What s the general motivation in democracies to completely ignore blatant evidence of a serious crime unless ie consent or warrant is given? Where is the threshold, ie for murder this sort of evidence should be OK no? Manslaughter? I guess anything flies for terrorism these days.

Ie if he kicked her to death, I can't imagine judge ignoring video evidence and letting him go.

Ideally it keeps checks and balances in place. If the evidence was admissible then there is a lack of balance, police would have a lot of incentive to search private property all the time to catch someone in a crime.

Nobody wants to ignore valid evidence of criminal guilt. In the US, the motivation is to uphold your constitutional fourth amendment rights, and implicitly to protect you against police and government abuse, of which there is a long and sordid history. It’s a tradeoff, and while it can lead to a few criminals getting away with things, it can also prevent sending innocent people to prison for life, or to the electric chair. There are a bunch of exceptions to the exclusionary rule [2], and courts do not necessarily apply the rule indiscriminately.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusionary_rule

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusionary_rule#Limitations

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Amendment_to_the_United...

The general motivation is the existence of rights. We are born with god-given inalienable rights, constitutions exist to protect those rights from the government. Part of this, is that the government can't illegally infringe upon those rights. If they think that we are doing X they need a warrant to search our property.

Where is the threshold is actually an interesting question. Since if for example the man killed the woman, but the video was illegally taken then it would be inadmissable. BUT police are known to construct cases around illegal evidence called parallel construction. So for example the police get an illegal video, they look for evidence find that a woman is missing, get a warrant to then find the video.

Where is the threshold I think the US has shown that the threshold is national security. No issues drone striking someone in a foreign country.

> We are born with god-given inalienable rights, constitutions exist to protect those rights from the government.

The political realist take is that “rights” are not some abstract, static group of protections but the direct result of political activity. Women didn’t have the right to vote until they did. People had the right to drink until they didn’t, and then they did again. 18 year olds didn’t have the right to vote until they did.

Secondly, one person’s right usually takes away something from another group or the government. The First Amendment takes away the ability for the government to punish speech they don’t like. The 13th amendment takes away a person’s right to own a slave. Previously, the deciding factor was force or capital.

It sounds reductionist but “rights” is more of a description of how the political/legal system actually works than some abstract notion handed down from Heaven.

What this means is that this list of rights can expand and contract with time, and it is in our interest to expand it as much as possible for as many people as possible. This takes active political participation because the default is for those who can command force (the government) and those with capital (wealthy people/corporations) to have power.

It's not a problem if police obtain a warrant. It's also OK if evidence is discovered while not performing an illegal search. For instance, if a police officer knocks on your door, you open it, and they see something in your apartment which gives them probable cause of the commission of a crime.

Notably, when he offended again, the court in that case ruled that the exclusionary rule did not apply for probation revocation hearings, unless the police misconduct was egregious. So, the video was admitted in that case.

https://casetext.com/case/people-v-chahal

Side note: California's Truth-in-Evidence clause in 1982 Proposition 8 forbids state exclusion of evidence requirements which are more stringent than that required under the federal Constitution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1982_California_Proposition_8

I usually don't like threads that go slightly off topic but I especially hate garbage humans that commit DV. Gurbaksh Chahal is truly a garbage human being, incredibly what he created at an early age but a garbage human being for being women multiple times.

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