Online media: more than 1000 sites publish articles generated by AI
The democratization of artificial intelligence already presents certain flaws on the web: according to the media Nextmore than 1000 French -speaking information websites use AI to generate articles on the fly. Worse, these “media” argue that their articles are written by journalists or experts; Without any apparent mention, these writings are actually created from scratch or translated by AI models. After A survey conducted by Next And Release150 of these web pages are also mentioned as sources on Wikipedia.
The dangerous juicy business doped at AI
Among the web information players, Newsguard is responsible for assessing the reliability of information and topicality sites that generate significant traffic. Its technology, also based on artificial intelligence, lists no less than 1,150 sites whose news is generated by AI. The interest of these media fueled by artificial intelligence lies in the monetization of the content. In the majority of cases, the economic model of these sites is based on advertising. Advertising agencies that collaborate with these platforms generally work algorithmic and without any particular look at the nature or quality of partner sites.
As with the Lambda user who uses Chatgpt or Google Gemini, artificial intelligence is sometimes the victim of hallucinations. However, the latter can represent a real danger as to disinformation when they become false affirmations, which is more viral. Certain articles generated by AI contain grotesque errors from time to time that can focus on the death of a celebrity or present a past event as if it had just happened.
Google closes your eyes on hybrid plagiarism
The generation of artificial intelligence articles raises questions compared to the concept of plagiarism. Admittedly, AI generates a new text itself, but it cannot investigate as a journalist would. When a specific writing covers a subject exclusively, AI models are able to appropriate it and generate a new version. This case is described by the Nice Matin group which explains that a shadow media, fueled by AI, operates in the Var region. The site in question publishes articles on subjects on which the Nice morning group was sometimes the only media present.
These anecdotes, which multiply, contribute to a new form of digital, media pollution and can be established as a hybrid form of plagiarism. Especially since these contents of content generated by IA prove to be very lucrative, to get rid of manual rewriting – as in the past – makes it possible to industrialize this practice and to focus on optimization of web referencing. New websites also regularly surface and rank with ease at the top of the results page on Google.
The Californian search engine explains that it is possible for any publisher to appear in the results of Google News, as long as it is in accordance with the rules. These include including information on the authors of published articles, clear dates and signatures and contact details. Most of the sites fueled by AI indeed provide the real names and contact details of legal officials, but do not hesitate to invent false authors by creating false profiles on Linkedin and X.
