this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2024
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
Worse yet, the erroneous reporting was scooped up by MSN — the somehow not-dead-yet Microsoft site that aggregates news — and was featured on its homepage for several hours before being taken down.
It's an unfortunate example of the tangible harms that arise when AI tools implicate real people in bad information as they confidently — and convincingly — weave together fact and fiction.
And if Bigfoot conspiracies slip through MSN's very large and automated cracks, it's not surprising that a real-enough-looking AI-generated article like "Prominent Irish broadcaster faces trial over alleged sexual misconduct" made it onto the site's homepage.
According to the NYT, the website was founded by an alleged abuser and tech entrepreneur named Gurbaksh Chahal, who billed BNN as "a revolution in the journalism industry."
Underpaid employees were asked to feed published articles from other news services into generative AI tools and spit out paraphrased versions.
Eventually, per the NYT, the website's AI tools randomly started assigning employees' names to AI-generated articles they never touched.
The original article contains 559 words, the summary contains 167 words. Saved 70%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
And now I’m reading a computer’s version of a story describing how a computer wrote a story that should have been discarded.
It's even better than that. It's a computer's version of a story describing how a computer wrote a story which was then front-paged by a computer.