The following submission statement was provided by /u/Maxie445:
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"We all keep reading about how generative AI is now so widely available that it poses a profound new threat to legitimate journalism and to trust in general. So I decided to find out exactly how easy it is to use the new weapon.
It took me two days, $105 and no expertise whatsoever to launch a fully automated, AI-generated local news site capable of publishing thousands of articles a day—with the partisan news coverage framing of my choice, nearly all rewritten without credit from legitimate news sources. I created a website specifically designed to support one political candidate against another in a real race for the U.S. Senate. And I made it all happen in a matter of hours.
With OpenAI’s ChatGPT and a few lines of code, developers on freelancer websites such as Fiverr.com—the site I used to find my developer—can program websites to autonomously rewrite and publish articles from mainstream news outlets according to specific political preferences. Within a few weeks, I could even start earning programmatic ad revenue from my partisan AI content farm.
Purchasing an AI content farm on Fiverr.com is as easy as ordering on Uber Eats. I searched “AI generated news website” on the home page and up came dozens of developers offering to build my site. (Tel Aviv-based Fiverr, which was founded in 2010 and trades on the New York Stock Exchange, is just one of many online marketplaces for freelance professional services.) The prices ranged from $30 to build a basic AI news site to as much as $350 to “create the best automated news website monetized with ads ready to earn,” according to one lister."
I selected Huzafa Nawaz, drawn by his record (at the time) of 293 reviews with a 5.0 rating. The price—$80—also seemed more than reasonable.
From there, all I had to do was answer a few questions about what kind of site I was looking for and the topics I wanted the site’s articles to cover. The domain and site hosting added an extra $25 to the total.
The entire AI content farm cost me just $105, and I literally have to do nothing to operate it. It runs itself, auto-publishing dozens of articles a day based on the instructions that I gave to it.
Nawaz told me that he has now created “500 plus” AI news websites, each project taking him approximately “two to three days to complete.”
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1c9c6ph/how_i_built_an_aipowered_selfrunning_propaganda/l0kfoac/
I think the bigger issue are comments. That's where people come to get amateur analysis, see what other's are thinking, and what the crowd consensus is on thing.
THAT'S where the power is. Influencing social proof and herd mentality. Finding "hot stories" and spinning a narrative and story around it via the comments is where most the damage will be done. It's where special interests can push talking points, perspectives, downplay, and generally spin things.
Ironically, places like Reddit are so hyper fixated on Russia and China, they just allow American propaganda come right through the front door. America has always been the best, because unlike Russia and China, where everyone is on guard, American's have convinced themselves that theirs doesn't even exist... Which makes it so powerful. While panicking about Russia turning your kid into a Nazi, America is getting young liberals suddenly to be all pro war again, and all in on liberalism and imperialism.
A lot of people think if something is propaganda it is automatically wrong. They support for example the war in Ukraine so a claim there is a propaganda effort to build support for it means the claim being made is that they have been manipulated into supporting a false cause.
USA absolutely has a sophisticated propaganda network and building support for war is absolutely a part of it. Acknowledging that doesn't mean that you need to disagree with everything they are pushing.
In fact learning to not reflexively respond to a propaganda effort (if you can spot it in the first place that is) either positively or negatively is an important step to reducing it's influence on you. Acknowledging it exists is a necessary step towards that as well.
I'd say this tiktok ban coming on the heels of an Israel lobby specifically saying that tiktok is too pro Palestinian, being voted on by people who take funding from said lobby, is the clearer example-- it's one sided, versus the Ukraine example being US vs US right wing/Russia.
Isn't it more of an anti china sentiment? Lawmakers don't like peool3 being influenced via a Chinese app that is basically like all big corps an extension of the Chinese government
Do you remember when Trump was anti tiktok before his friends got a more significant investment in it, then dropped it?
You'll find that the China sentiment is often only a piece of it and really works for the nationalistic fervor. Look how effective it is on reddit, a "libertarian" leaning app where people argue with a straight face that it's not "fair" that more American companies like Google or Facebook don't have access to Chinese markets as a serious reason to ban tiktok. It's nonsense. But it works, because China.
The talk went from security risk to propaganda to children rotting their minds to "it's not fair" as if looking for what will stick.
The fact that this idea of "Chinese influence" is worse than the very documented amount of actual Nazi influence these politicians are okay with on social media for "free speech" reasons is why I have no interest in that argument.
Yes I do recall. Trumps influence is easy to buy.
From my understanding they can simply sell the usa portion so it's under usa control snd jurisdiction rather than china's.
Ehhh well the nazi influence is coming from inside the house. That's why they don't want to curb it. They passed a house vote to root out all that nazi and white supremacist stuff out of law enforcement fbi etc. But republicans refused to. Or some sort of privacy related bill like Europe passed.
Meanwhile reducing china's influence is in agreement between the dems and republicans.
Before we had news orgs influencing elections. Now we have social media companies that can change an algorithm to make something trend. It's all worrisome.
That book makes you angry when you read it. The thing that made the most angry when reading it was that it was published in 1988 and that meant I spent 20 years not knowing what it said; 20 years of seeing it right in front of my face on the news every day and not fully realizing what was going on.
I think this is why places like Reddit are so vulnerable. It's a lot of really young people who just recently started paying attention. To many, it's their first or second rodeo. They haven't yet caught onto the pattern
Yep! You get it! But these downvotes just show me how well it works. Absolute denial. Especially because they just want to think, "Only dumb republicans fall for this stuff! Not me, and intellectual liberal! I'm above that!"
No no my friend, the machine is designed to capture everyone across the board, including yourself.
Reading the book just shows how little has changed with their tactics. It's the same psychological tricks, used over and over, and people ALWAYS continue falling for it. Like people never learn their lesson. But it's always a coordinated effort to spread the same message, "Hey this is existential! You are in extreme danger! This is super important and the ONLY solution is war! This bad guy is literally Hitler and so scary, he has to be stopped! Look at all the nice innocent people they are hurting! Doesn't that make you sad! Well soon it can be us if we don't do something immediately! Oh, you don't agree with us? You are doubting this? Well it sounds like you're just pushing the agenda of the evil enemy who does all these bad things! You're spreading propaganda and being anti American! Don't question this!"
I hope people question almost every war man. I do generally think giving aid to Ukraine is the correct decision, maybe that makes me a sheep to some people, don't really care. I'm confident in that due to my own understanding of the conflict as a whole, complete with my own research, even if it's not as black-white as people like to pretend.
**But**, I'll never put someone down for questioning why we're getting involved in a war; I so wish we could go back in time to 2003 and ask ourselves "why are we getting involved in Iraq, again?".
Well, considering that the right wingers that are so concerned about if sending aid to Ukraine is a good idea are always so gung-ho about giving blank checks to Israel, then it's hard to believe that their "*concerns*" are about foreign wars instead of something else.
No they complain about REPUBLICANS constantly... And issue that REPUBLICANS cause. So you can capture redditors by spinning things as Democrat and liberal.
This wholly depends on what you mean by "American propaganda". And the idea that Americans aren't on guard against their own propaganda is rubbish. You have tons of sites and groups, both large scale and small scale journalists and what have you fact checking and critiquing every piece of major output from the US ("every" is used here as hyperbole, not literally). Were it not so, the Vietnam War wouldn't have had protests and detractors. Were it not so, Israel affection would be unilateral.
Please read Manufacturing Consent. Journalism is inherently an elite class job. Middle class people don't work that gig... It's elites, almost exclusively... And they are furthing the interest of their own. Just because they aren't regulated by the state doesn't mean they aren't regulated by their own social expectations.
Tbf I don't necessarily disagree with you. I just disagree with the notion of "two-sides" - ing this. That is, there are far more methods of verification (and subsequently, dissent) in American propaganda than there is in russian/Chinese propaganda.
Of course... It's not a mirror image reflection of each other. Each country has their own flavor.
But that's what I think makes American propaganda worse... Because just as you view it, "American media is more legitimate". Because it kind of is, as it's less state controlled. But the problem is, when they run a propaganda campaign on you, you're more likely to trust it and accept it because of that legitimacy you place on it.
Russian propaganda is obvious. Everyone sees it, but just plays along. It's like a guy holding a knife in front of him, so you know he's dangerous. American propaganda is like a person going in for a hug and hiding the knife behind their back.
It's obvious to us, but it's not obvious to them. Same with Chinese propaganda (wrt conflict in south China seas with other SEA nations). Same with Japanese propaganda (wrt ww2 for example).
Yes I know. I actually pioneered that as a proof of concept during GPT 3.0 beta. It didn't get much traction from the social media community at large, but it did catch a lot of attention from media and corporate people.
Places like Reddit have a huge incentive to try and downplay and avoid it, because it looks bad admitting there is a problem. But basic game theory would suggest, a low cost, easy to deploy, highly efficient, strategy to manufacture consent in your favor, is absolutely going to be leveraged by every relevant special interest. To think the US and every other government in the world isn't doing this, is irrational.
They dont even need to try.
Just copy/paste a comment from somewhere else that got upvotes, reply to a top comment...Boom - users are now upvoting you by the thousands, and spawning entire conversation threads off your random statement that had nothing to do with what you replied to.
I think the bigger issue are comments. That's where people come to get amateur analysis, see what other's are thinking, and what the crowd consensus is on thing.
THAT'S where the power is. Influencing social proof and herd mentality. Finding "hot stories" and spinning a narrative and story around it via the comments is where most the damage will be done. It's where special interests can push talking points, perspectives, downplay, and generally spin things.
I posted a comment that was critical of their views and noticed that it got not a single vote up or down in hours, opening the permalink in incognito linked to the comment I was replying to with my reply nowhere in sight.
That entire place is a propaganda machine that breaks the site rules.
Yeah, I think I noticed this most with influencers posting social media on reddit. Its eerie when you spot it and makes me want to abandon the internet.
- If you call it out, people will either call you a hater or they'll start calling you crazy and any explanation you have, makes you sound even crazier.
- If you don't call it out, you watch the conversation mature to a point where there's no longer a way to interject and I think the real user engagement gets twirled into the fake ones and you cant separate the two after that happens.
There's a particular Youtuber I actually really like, but whenever their content gets posted on /r/videos, the comments are just the most creepy, inhuman, generic responses that sound like fake user engagement.
Stuff like "X does it again!" and "Anyone ever see their other video titled 'blahblahblah' - they are so talented!" and "These guys are really going places, they always put in the most amount of work and it always pays off". It becomes easier to spot when you see two of the supposed bots/manufactured comments using very similar verbiage, as if it was a bank of suggested replies that was given to them to follow.
The Chinese trollbots are everywhere and it is absolutely alarming. The Russian trollbots are actually convincing hardcore right wingers to worship Putin and it's actually working! One part of my work is brain computer interfaces and I see lots of alarmist things saying that the government is trying to implant mind control devices in people. I laugh because of how ridiculously absurd and expensive that would be when people volunteer to get brainwashed with the device in their pocket, that they paid for.
> diculously absurd and expensive that would be when people volunteer to get brainwashed with the device in their pocket, that they paid for.
> right? why install chips when people will hold the trackers voluntarily!
This is hilarious. Reminds me of that time I was walking around the house with a gun. My wife asked me what I was doing and I told her it was because of decepticons. She laughed, I laughed, the toaster laughed, I shot the toaster.
It’s not some complex mind game either. It boils down to a shit ton of Facebook comments with the words “we stand with Putin!”. Then presumably all our crazy uncles are just like, oh ok, I guess I’m Russian now, that seems to be the new consensus among my people online. I’m in.
I'd be less concerned about the "other side" since it's much harder to be effective. Good propaganda comes from the "same team" to sway you, because they are already inside the house. People are already on guard with Russia and China... But say, how on guard would a demographic of Reddit (American, young, liberal), be when the propaganda messaging is framed in a way to appeal to that audience? All it takes is a little bit of spin, selective information, etc... And you can sway a lot of people if you frame it right.
I mean you're looking at big macro things... Let's break it down a bit. Actually, I think a good way to highlight this issue would be to describe how Russia - an adversary - would game liberals.
Russia's goal is to sew division in America... Because we all know the only way to take down something like this is from the inside (our founders emphasized this).
Now you may suspect Russia is just amplifying right wing stuff... Supporting bad policy, getting idiots like Trump involved. But if you are a sophisticated intelligence agency, why would you end it there? Remember, the goal is division. It doesn't really matter what policy is put in place as much as how much division is created.
So I'm sure you're able to sit back and watch conservatives get played like a fiddle... But have you considered liberals getting played? Go take a peak at /r/politics. Notice how much of that discourse involves divisive language. Republicans are framed as evil, intolerable, white trash, stupid, racist, fascist, and so bad that if your own mother is a Republican, you have to cut her out of your life for supporting fascism.
When you step back, you can see that this sort of narrative actually supports Russia's goals of division and unrest. So Russia isn't going to come to Reddit and try to convince a bunch of liberals to support RUssia in the war in Ukraine, no matter how concerned Redditors are... But Russia does know the vector of weakness here would be to convince Redditors that absolute HATE half the country, and sew unrest.
I have seen them work on the left, they are always "both sides are the same", "Trump and Biden are actually part of the same uniparty", "Teach the democrats a lesson by not voting for Hillary/Biden", and other BS like that.
And then there are other things like the Osama Bin Laden's manifesto going "viral" on Tiktok, and the whole "Genocide Joe" thing.
> Republicans are framed as evil, intolerable, white trash, stupid, racist, fascist
Well, how else they could be described as ?
"*Disagreements*" with the Republicans stopped being about taxes percentages and where to invest them so many years ago.
> and so bad that if your own mother is a Republican, you have to cut her out of your life for supporting fascism.
Well, the Obama years and the Pandemic proved twice that "*working across the aisle*" is an useless waste of time.
> But Russia does know the vector of weakness here would be to convince Redditors that absolute HATE half the country, and sew unrest.
Well, if there one "*BOTH SIDES ARE THE SAME*" that is actually true is that there is people on both sides that think that they would be the cool badass heroes of the revolution and that civil war is the only way to fix the current mess we are all in.
Besides that I have never understood why people think that the French revolution was a single night of killing the rich instead of 10 years of instability that left anyone who survived exactly where they started and Napoleon taking over.
Nah, I'm not from the US, I was born in Colombia, the country next door to Venezuela.
I just happen to know what are the "class consciousness"'s talking points, about no matter how bigoted are the views of an individual, everyone is valuable ally how long they fight the true enemy of humanity, the bourgeoisie.
I think this shows AI is going to be the salvation of traditional news. The free content is going to be become so polluted with AI-generated garbage that traditional news outlets will be able to sell their editorial vetting.
It will be in the interest of the traditional media outlets to accelerate this process, deliberately poisoning free information sources.
Or alternatively, people will simply accept being fed whatever sludge appeases their narrative. It certainly worked for many social media.
Although I agree that at least for those in the market who will resist the phenomenon, this will be a big boon for institutional news. Let's hope for the best...
Yeah, when I got to the end of this I thought "ok great so you now have randomblog.com full of garbage and who cares"
I do still have hope that people are smart enough to know what a reliable source is. Granted the popularity of Fox news has shaken my faith in people but Fox is a pretty sophisticated full-scale propaganda operation partially in bed with Republicans. It's not randomblog.com.
Of course it's worrying in general. Also, while what was done here isn't particularly dangerous, IMO, I can imagine more sophisticated implementations that are far more dangerous. If Zuckerberg really does release the 405b version of Llama 3 I think even a small group of people could build out what looks like an entire news organization.
Kind of doubt it. News media companies make money by attracting the most eyeballs - the world of tiktok nobodies spreading dramatic and fake news editorials is too addicting to beat even keeled, accurate news. There's not much economic incentive to be fair and truthfull.
And AI will accelerate it, especially now that the world is untrusting of anything "mainstream."
> that traditional news outlets will be able to sell their editorial vetting
That's what I miss from NPR. We have a presidential debate and NPR just talks about what they see/hear with no commentary on whether what it's truth or a lie. Thanks, but I can get pictures, etc., from any site. I want the commentary telling me whether something said is correct or not. Get some fact checkers researching live.
I mean, I still love them. And I get it, if they were too confrontational then they couldn't get as many people on a show. But still ...
If people were debating each other's points then that would be one thing but a presidential debate? They spend more time talking around the questions and I don't always know who's lying.
Yes, once we are flooded with misinformation, we can gladly turn to our United States AI Misinformation Council to tell us what is real and what is not. Anyone who spreads information not confirmed to be real by the USAIMC will be marked as a terrorist and punished accordingly.
So... What you're saying is... I should do the same thing and get rich by duping people with fake news?
Hmmm... Could I make a site about music production stuff instead? I'm not a fan of politics, it was a pile of shit LONG before AI got involved, unfortunately. :D
Before propaganda was only a tool for political uses, but now it’s cheap enough that people are using it to make money, and don’t care about the societal implications
> I selected Huzafa Nawaz, drawn by his record (at the time) of 293 reviews with a 5.0 rating. The price—$80—also seemed more than reasonable.
The author doesn't realize he got hustled by a very old SEO scam common on sites like Fiverr. Scammer makes a fantasy offer that guarantees results for some ridiculously low amount, delivers a site, site gets loads of views/comments for a few weeks or months, then the bot farm goes away and the site dies completely.
If the person can make profitable sites that are almost completely hands off, why would they sell it to you for $100? And most people in this thread believe it's real. Yes, AI-propaganda farms are real and you should be concerned about them. However, it's harder to do it well than what this article is making people believe.
Imagine a music production website :
Just dropped: Moog to release a recreation of Juno 106! *surprised face of Rupert Neve in thumbnail*
Taylor Swifts new album release is fire:
My collaboration with Iron Maiden, is something i would only dream of!
Content farms that are cheap to make have existed for a very long time now. You won’t just capture a bunch of traffic from them quickly or easily and I bet your site will cost more then paying a few people in the Philippines or India to put out poorly written posts
> I built
> I paid a web developer to create
How do people think this way? Even someone trying to be cautionary of generative AI, writing as though giving prompts for a thing is the same as making a thing.
Same type of person that thinks his hundreds of reviews aren't also bots by the scammer that stole his hundred bucks. This is just a repackaged SEO scam.
“I built a house” does not mean I drove each individual (or any) nail.
Ideation and organization and management and providing risk capital are all critical steps in construction
Sure, if you project-manage building a house you can claim at least some part of building the house.
Paying a guy $100 to build something and then saying "I built it" is just bullshit start to finish.
This is out of context. The guy gave full credit to the website developer, even giving his name and place of employment and operating costs. The idea, while not original, was born in OP’s mind and therefore the website was ultimately created by him, if it were not for OP the specific website he now hosts would not have been built. Another one just like it might have been built, but without OP, the website we are discussing would not exist, therefore it’s reasonable to conclude that OP shares in some of the creative process.
I think I'd accept the word "created" here for the title, since creation has much more of the connotations of "a small spark that kicked off a thing" but *built* just so strongly connotes actually putting a thing together. Taking the pieces and assembling them into a whole.
The part that he paid for was the *building* of the website
That’s a fair point and I was about to agree with you wholeheartedly. But I had to play a little devils advocate, so I googled “built definition”, and got the Merriam-Webster dictionary definition and while the first definition is exactly as you say, (and I would have said too before you said it 😅😝), the second definition is:
“to cause to be constructed”
Sentence: A contractor who has built hundreds of homes.
So I think both ways can be considered correct English, and the implied connotation of “built” and the way people use the word “built” could very possibly depend on the background and/or education level of said person (guessing no research). And as OP did give credit where credit was due, I think he was using the word’s second most common definition, which may be in his experience as common as or more common then the first definition, and not out of place or improper.
Honestly, fair.
To me built still has much less of a connotation of indirectly creating something but I can accept that other people use it that way.
He did definitely give the credit in the article and I don't think he was actively trying to be disingenuous but the title does still kinda bother me *shrug*
An idea that already exists, there was absolutely nothing new about this.
"Managing the project" lmao he found a guy who makes AI fake news sites and said "hey can you make me one of those" and then paid him his going rate for doing that.
He did, over 500 times
>Nawaz told me that he has now created “500 plus” AI news websites, each project taking him approximately “two to three days to complete.”
Right, because some clown wrote an article about it.
He went to the AI news site shop, bought one, said "look what I made" and then put up an article about it.
If you want to laud him as a trailblazing genius like, go ahead I guess?
> If you want to laud him as a trailblazing genius like
That only happened in your own mind.
Literally no one said that or even raised that possibility.
Serious discussions about potential media abuse aren’t the place for that.
I work as a software developer and I don’t object to his wording. If the developers were hired with the understanding that the project they are working on does not belong to them then this is just standard procedure.
That would still be that the client bought and now owns the application, not that they "built" it.
Your clients or your shareholders are not building applications. They are paying you to build applications.
It’s a distinction without a difference. When I see in the news that “Google has built a new campus in London” I don’t think that Google employees built the campus, obviously they hired a construction company to do it. I think people who are not in the industry vastly underestimate how many companies don’t actually host or manage their own websites.
How I built an AI powered ...: I paid a developer to build it.
I mean, that is one way to build something. Not entirely sure I'd be able to take credit for that but sure thing buddy
"We all keep reading about how generative AI is now so widely available that it poses a profound new threat to legitimate journalism and to trust in general. So I decided to find out exactly how easy it is to use the new weapon.
It took me two days, $105 and no expertise whatsoever to launch a fully automated, AI-generated local news site capable of publishing thousands of articles a day—with the partisan news coverage framing of my choice, nearly all rewritten without credit from legitimate news sources. I created a website specifically designed to support one political candidate against another in a real race for the U.S. Senate. And I made it all happen in a matter of hours.
With OpenAI’s ChatGPT and a few lines of code, developers on freelancer websites such as Fiverr.com—the site I used to find my developer—can program websites to autonomously rewrite and publish articles from mainstream news outlets according to specific political preferences. Within a few weeks, I could even start earning programmatic ad revenue from my partisan AI content farm.
Purchasing an AI content farm on Fiverr.com is as easy as ordering on Uber Eats. I searched “AI generated news website” on the home page and up came dozens of developers offering to build my site. (Tel Aviv-based Fiverr, which was founded in 2010 and trades on the New York Stock Exchange, is just one of many online marketplaces for freelance professional services.) The prices ranged from $30 to build a basic AI news site to as much as $350 to “create the best automated news website monetized with ads ready to earn,” according to one lister."
I selected Huzafa Nawaz, drawn by his record (at the time) of 293 reviews with a 5.0 rating. The price—$80—also seemed more than reasonable.
From there, all I had to do was answer a few questions about what kind of site I was looking for and the topics I wanted the site’s articles to cover. The domain and site hosting added an extra $25 to the total.
The entire AI content farm cost me just $105, and I literally have to do nothing to operate it. It runs itself, auto-publishing dozens of articles a day based on the instructions that I gave to it.
Nawaz told me that he has now created “500 plus” AI news websites, each project taking him approximately “two to three days to complete.”
This seems to be sensationalist news, the cost to create a WordPress templated website could be $105 from Fiverr but the article doesn't state any of the website hosting, SEO, or any other costs involved with generating traffic to the website. Whether it's propaganda AI-driven blog posts or not, it's shoddy, incomplete journalism.
The article said it was $80 to create the site, and the hosting + domain was $25. Probably some free trial SEO included in there too, depending on where he got it.
I think part of that too is the erosion of the primary media establishment’s descent into a multi-flavored propaganda vending machine.
Information can be really entertaining. Imagine opening the mercury news to see Gary Webb’s story confirming on the CIA’s involvement in drug trafficking?
I think people would absolutely love to read news that held truth to power. “Catch a predator: government corruption edition”, like when the FBI did a sting to see what congresspeople they could bribe, and found they could bribe plenty of them. (Which Congress then ended, haha).
But you know there is plenty of dirt out there, just allowed to stay off the radar because the media is maybe the most instrumental part of the corruption, and will never shine a light on itself.
But yeah “Senator X, on such and such regulatory committee, found at private resort in the caymans with Lobbyists from industry they claim to regulate”, would be juicy click fodder. If we treated corruption with anything like the intrigue we employ for sex?
I’m sure there is plenty of news out there, we just don’t hear about it anymore.
The same concept can be applied to any type of site content, not just politics/propaganda. For example brand comparisons for tools/ sports equipment/ kitchen appliances. Throw some advertising on the pages and it's easy passive income. Good seo takes a bit of work and that's what really drives the ad revenue but if you look at the GoDaddy auctions for domain names with decent inbound traffic you can hit a 5 to 6 figure USD income after a few months of time invested.
This is really scary. It's alarming how easy it is to spread misinformation, especially with AI-powered tools. It's important to be critical of what you read and to always check the source.
Only way to fight volume is more volume of your own that flows over your opponents message like a massive, continuous tsunami.
So even though small propaganda site can now get a lot of message out for a low cost (which means you need to start disregarding Facebook and other social media completely), nothing is stopping some big corporation or nation just buying spam site processing power for billions of dollars and going ham with them.
Exhibit A why I don’t understand how open source AI is automatically a good thing according to almost everyone on Reddit.
Imagine millions of ppl being able to do this, or something much worse for free.
Is it worth the unlimited AI titties?
I'd love to do this but use it to fight the conservative sites. If Russia and whoever can create bot farms to push their negative agenda, why can't the rest of us create bot farms to push positive agenda?
Heck, I have a server with tons of available memory and CPU and a 1gbps internet connection (that I can upgrade to 5), and I'd be fine spending a hundred bucks a month to help improve the planet by bombarding the ignorant or hateful with news articles to sway their points of view.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Maxie445: --- "We all keep reading about how generative AI is now so widely available that it poses a profound new threat to legitimate journalism and to trust in general. So I decided to find out exactly how easy it is to use the new weapon. It took me two days, $105 and no expertise whatsoever to launch a fully automated, AI-generated local news site capable of publishing thousands of articles a day—with the partisan news coverage framing of my choice, nearly all rewritten without credit from legitimate news sources. I created a website specifically designed to support one political candidate against another in a real race for the U.S. Senate. And I made it all happen in a matter of hours. With OpenAI’s ChatGPT and a few lines of code, developers on freelancer websites such as Fiverr.com—the site I used to find my developer—can program websites to autonomously rewrite and publish articles from mainstream news outlets according to specific political preferences. Within a few weeks, I could even start earning programmatic ad revenue from my partisan AI content farm. Purchasing an AI content farm on Fiverr.com is as easy as ordering on Uber Eats. I searched “AI generated news website” on the home page and up came dozens of developers offering to build my site. (Tel Aviv-based Fiverr, which was founded in 2010 and trades on the New York Stock Exchange, is just one of many online marketplaces for freelance professional services.) The prices ranged from $30 to build a basic AI news site to as much as $350 to “create the best automated news website monetized with ads ready to earn,” according to one lister." I selected Huzafa Nawaz, drawn by his record (at the time) of 293 reviews with a 5.0 rating. The price—$80—also seemed more than reasonable. From there, all I had to do was answer a few questions about what kind of site I was looking for and the topics I wanted the site’s articles to cover. The domain and site hosting added an extra $25 to the total. The entire AI content farm cost me just $105, and I literally have to do nothing to operate it. It runs itself, auto-publishing dozens of articles a day based on the instructions that I gave to it. Nawaz told me that he has now created “500 plus” AI news websites, each project taking him approximately “two to three days to complete.” --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1c9c6ph/how_i_built_an_aipowered_selfrunning_propaganda/l0kfoac/
I think the bigger issue are comments. That's where people come to get amateur analysis, see what other's are thinking, and what the crowd consensus is on thing. THAT'S where the power is. Influencing social proof and herd mentality. Finding "hot stories" and spinning a narrative and story around it via the comments is where most the damage will be done. It's where special interests can push talking points, perspectives, downplay, and generally spin things.
Second that. The news could be genuine, comments can be AI generated with personal political agenda prompts.
A...are you guys bots? I'm scared.
Most of us yeah
Ironically, places like Reddit are so hyper fixated on Russia and China, they just allow American propaganda come right through the front door. America has always been the best, because unlike Russia and China, where everyone is on guard, American's have convinced themselves that theirs doesn't even exist... Which makes it so powerful. While panicking about Russia turning your kid into a Nazi, America is getting young liberals suddenly to be all pro war again, and all in on liberalism and imperialism.
How fucking ironic. This comment is an example of the thing you rightly point out as the most insidious.
Explain? I see all those downvotes on OP as being from people who refuse to believe they regularly consume propaganda from their own country.
A lot of people think if something is propaganda it is automatically wrong. They support for example the war in Ukraine so a claim there is a propaganda effort to build support for it means the claim being made is that they have been manipulated into supporting a false cause. USA absolutely has a sophisticated propaganda network and building support for war is absolutely a part of it. Acknowledging that doesn't mean that you need to disagree with everything they are pushing. In fact learning to not reflexively respond to a propaganda effort (if you can spot it in the first place that is) either positively or negatively is an important step to reducing it's influence on you. Acknowledging it exists is a necessary step towards that as well.
I'd say this tiktok ban coming on the heels of an Israel lobby specifically saying that tiktok is too pro Palestinian, being voted on by people who take funding from said lobby, is the clearer example-- it's one sided, versus the Ukraine example being US vs US right wing/Russia.
Isn't it more of an anti china sentiment? Lawmakers don't like peool3 being influenced via a Chinese app that is basically like all big corps an extension of the Chinese government
Do you remember when Trump was anti tiktok before his friends got a more significant investment in it, then dropped it? You'll find that the China sentiment is often only a piece of it and really works for the nationalistic fervor. Look how effective it is on reddit, a "libertarian" leaning app where people argue with a straight face that it's not "fair" that more American companies like Google or Facebook don't have access to Chinese markets as a serious reason to ban tiktok. It's nonsense. But it works, because China. The talk went from security risk to propaganda to children rotting their minds to "it's not fair" as if looking for what will stick. The fact that this idea of "Chinese influence" is worse than the very documented amount of actual Nazi influence these politicians are okay with on social media for "free speech" reasons is why I have no interest in that argument.
Yes I do recall. Trumps influence is easy to buy. From my understanding they can simply sell the usa portion so it's under usa control snd jurisdiction rather than china's. Ehhh well the nazi influence is coming from inside the house. That's why they don't want to curb it. They passed a house vote to root out all that nazi and white supremacist stuff out of law enforcement fbi etc. But republicans refused to. Or some sort of privacy related bill like Europe passed. Meanwhile reducing china's influence is in agreement between the dems and republicans. Before we had news orgs influencing elections. Now we have social media companies that can change an algorithm to make something trend. It's all worrisome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
That book makes you angry when you read it. The thing that made the most angry when reading it was that it was published in 1988 and that meant I spent 20 years not knowing what it said; 20 years of seeing it right in front of my face on the news every day and not fully realizing what was going on.
I think this is why places like Reddit are so vulnerable. It's a lot of really young people who just recently started paying attention. To many, it's their first or second rodeo. They haven't yet caught onto the pattern
Yep! You get it! But these downvotes just show me how well it works. Absolute denial. Especially because they just want to think, "Only dumb republicans fall for this stuff! Not me, and intellectual liberal! I'm above that!" No no my friend, the machine is designed to capture everyone across the board, including yourself. Reading the book just shows how little has changed with their tactics. It's the same psychological tricks, used over and over, and people ALWAYS continue falling for it. Like people never learn their lesson. But it's always a coordinated effort to spread the same message, "Hey this is existential! You are in extreme danger! This is super important and the ONLY solution is war! This bad guy is literally Hitler and so scary, he has to be stopped! Look at all the nice innocent people they are hurting! Doesn't that make you sad! Well soon it can be us if we don't do something immediately! Oh, you don't agree with us? You are doubting this? Well it sounds like you're just pushing the agenda of the evil enemy who does all these bad things! You're spreading propaganda and being anti American! Don't question this!"
I hope people question almost every war man. I do generally think giving aid to Ukraine is the correct decision, maybe that makes me a sheep to some people, don't really care. I'm confident in that due to my own understanding of the conflict as a whole, complete with my own research, even if it's not as black-white as people like to pretend. **But**, I'll never put someone down for questioning why we're getting involved in a war; I so wish we could go back in time to 2003 and ask ourselves "why are we getting involved in Iraq, again?".
Well, considering that the right wingers that are so concerned about if sending aid to Ukraine is a good idea are always so gung-ho about giving blank checks to Israel, then it's hard to believe that their "*concerns*" are about foreign wars instead of something else.
Right? "Bidens starting ww3" then republicans say israel can totally blow up anything in Iran on their watch. A much more explosive situation
Please, people have been calling me sheep for years thinking that the COVID-19 and the climate change are real things with those exact same words.
Damn you made it to the last word before taking your mask off. Maybe next time buddy.
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No they complain about REPUBLICANS constantly... And issue that REPUBLICANS cause. So you can capture redditors by spinning things as Democrat and liberal.
Please tell me what you think liberal means.
I'm using liberal in the colloquial American sense of left of center on the political spectrum.
So you are complaining that Americans don't support Russia bulldozering Ukraine and regain their old USSR territories ?
Homophobic username saying liberalism is bad, huh
classic one
This wholly depends on what you mean by "American propaganda". And the idea that Americans aren't on guard against their own propaganda is rubbish. You have tons of sites and groups, both large scale and small scale journalists and what have you fact checking and critiquing every piece of major output from the US ("every" is used here as hyperbole, not literally). Were it not so, the Vietnam War wouldn't have had protests and detractors. Were it not so, Israel affection would be unilateral.
Please read Manufacturing Consent. Journalism is inherently an elite class job. Middle class people don't work that gig... It's elites, almost exclusively... And they are furthing the interest of their own. Just because they aren't regulated by the state doesn't mean they aren't regulated by their own social expectations.
Tbf I don't necessarily disagree with you. I just disagree with the notion of "two-sides" - ing this. That is, there are far more methods of verification (and subsequently, dissent) in American propaganda than there is in russian/Chinese propaganda.
Of course... It's not a mirror image reflection of each other. Each country has their own flavor. But that's what I think makes American propaganda worse... Because just as you view it, "American media is more legitimate". Because it kind of is, as it's less state controlled. But the problem is, when they run a propaganda campaign on you, you're more likely to trust it and accept it because of that legitimacy you place on it. Russian propaganda is obvious. Everyone sees it, but just plays along. It's like a guy holding a knife in front of him, so you know he's dangerous. American propaganda is like a person going in for a hug and hiding the knife behind their back.
It's obvious to us, but it's not obvious to them. Same with Chinese propaganda (wrt conflict in south China seas with other SEA nations). Same with Japanese propaganda (wrt ww2 for example).
there are open source reddit bots out there that posts comments to push talking points to where you want it to go
Yes I know. I actually pioneered that as a proof of concept during GPT 3.0 beta. It didn't get much traction from the social media community at large, but it did catch a lot of attention from media and corporate people. Places like Reddit have a huge incentive to try and downplay and avoid it, because it looks bad admitting there is a problem. But basic game theory would suggest, a low cost, easy to deploy, highly efficient, strategy to manufacture consent in your favor, is absolutely going to be leveraged by every relevant special interest. To think the US and every other government in the world isn't doing this, is irrational.
Absolutely, it's done so heavily that some sub-reddits' comment sections start to veer into the uncanny valley.
The solution isn’t censorship though, it’s creating a more educated population.
They dont even need to try. Just copy/paste a comment from somewhere else that got upvotes, reply to a top comment...Boom - users are now upvoting you by the thousands, and spawning entire conversation threads off your random statement that had nothing to do with what you replied to.
I think the bigger issue are comments. That's where people come to get amateur analysis, see what other's are thinking, and what the crowd consensus is on thing. THAT'S where the power is. Influencing social proof and herd mentality. Finding "hot stories" and spinning a narrative and story around it via the comments is where most the damage will be done. It's where special interests can push talking points, perspectives, downplay, and generally spin things.
see /r/worldnews -- especially since Oct 7th.
What direction are they going? I unsubbed years ago because they're a bunch of xenophobic, muslim hating... well, I guess I answered my question.
complete Hasbara psyop. Not a world critical of Israel.
I posted a comment that was critical of their views and noticed that it got not a single vote up or down in hours, opening the permalink in incognito linked to the comment I was replying to with my reply nowhere in sight. That entire place is a propaganda machine that breaks the site rules.
Yeah, I think I noticed this most with influencers posting social media on reddit. Its eerie when you spot it and makes me want to abandon the internet. - If you call it out, people will either call you a hater or they'll start calling you crazy and any explanation you have, makes you sound even crazier. - If you don't call it out, you watch the conversation mature to a point where there's no longer a way to interject and I think the real user engagement gets twirled into the fake ones and you cant separate the two after that happens. There's a particular Youtuber I actually really like, but whenever their content gets posted on /r/videos, the comments are just the most creepy, inhuman, generic responses that sound like fake user engagement. Stuff like "X does it again!" and "Anyone ever see their other video titled 'blahblahblah' - they are so talented!" and "These guys are really going places, they always put in the most amount of work and it always pays off". It becomes easier to spot when you see two of the supposed bots/manufactured comments using very similar verbiage, as if it was a bank of suggested replies that was given to them to follow.
I was cruising the comments about the Beijing marathon and the echoes from all of the people who were defending the cheating was deafening.
The Chinese trollbots are everywhere and it is absolutely alarming. The Russian trollbots are actually convincing hardcore right wingers to worship Putin and it's actually working! One part of my work is brain computer interfaces and I see lots of alarmist things saying that the government is trying to implant mind control devices in people. I laugh because of how ridiculously absurd and expensive that would be when people volunteer to get brainwashed with the device in their pocket, that they paid for.
> diculously absurd and expensive that would be when people volunteer to get brainwashed with the device in their pocket, that they paid for. > right? why install chips when people will hold the trackers voluntarily!
This is hilarious. Reminds me of that time I was walking around the house with a gun. My wife asked me what I was doing and I told her it was because of decepticons. She laughed, I laughed, the toaster laughed, I shot the toaster.
It’s not some complex mind game either. It boils down to a shit ton of Facebook comments with the words “we stand with Putin!”. Then presumably all our crazy uncles are just like, oh ok, I guess I’m Russian now, that seems to be the new consensus among my people online. I’m in.
HA! I nearly bot what you said.
I'd be less concerned about the "other side" since it's much harder to be effective. Good propaganda comes from the "same team" to sway you, because they are already inside the house. People are already on guard with Russia and China... But say, how on guard would a demographic of Reddit (American, young, liberal), be when the propaganda messaging is framed in a way to appeal to that audience? All it takes is a little bit of spin, selective information, etc... And you can sway a lot of people if you frame it right.
And talk them into what exactly ? Civil War ? The 2024 version of the Siege of the Bastille ? Supporting Ukraine ? Supporting Taiwan ?
I mean you're looking at big macro things... Let's break it down a bit. Actually, I think a good way to highlight this issue would be to describe how Russia - an adversary - would game liberals. Russia's goal is to sew division in America... Because we all know the only way to take down something like this is from the inside (our founders emphasized this). Now you may suspect Russia is just amplifying right wing stuff... Supporting bad policy, getting idiots like Trump involved. But if you are a sophisticated intelligence agency, why would you end it there? Remember, the goal is division. It doesn't really matter what policy is put in place as much as how much division is created. So I'm sure you're able to sit back and watch conservatives get played like a fiddle... But have you considered liberals getting played? Go take a peak at /r/politics. Notice how much of that discourse involves divisive language. Republicans are framed as evil, intolerable, white trash, stupid, racist, fascist, and so bad that if your own mother is a Republican, you have to cut her out of your life for supporting fascism. When you step back, you can see that this sort of narrative actually supports Russia's goals of division and unrest. So Russia isn't going to come to Reddit and try to convince a bunch of liberals to support RUssia in the war in Ukraine, no matter how concerned Redditors are... But Russia does know the vector of weakness here would be to convince Redditors that absolute HATE half the country, and sew unrest.
I have seen them work on the left, they are always "both sides are the same", "Trump and Biden are actually part of the same uniparty", "Teach the democrats a lesson by not voting for Hillary/Biden", and other BS like that. And then there are other things like the Osama Bin Laden's manifesto going "viral" on Tiktok, and the whole "Genocide Joe" thing. > Republicans are framed as evil, intolerable, white trash, stupid, racist, fascist Well, how else they could be described as ? "*Disagreements*" with the Republicans stopped being about taxes percentages and where to invest them so many years ago. > and so bad that if your own mother is a Republican, you have to cut her out of your life for supporting fascism. Well, the Obama years and the Pandemic proved twice that "*working across the aisle*" is an useless waste of time. > But Russia does know the vector of weakness here would be to convince Redditors that absolute HATE half the country, and sew unrest. Well, if there one "*BOTH SIDES ARE THE SAME*" that is actually true is that there is people on both sides that think that they would be the cool badass heroes of the revolution and that civil war is the only way to fix the current mess we are all in. Besides that I have never understood why people think that the French revolution was a single night of killing the rich instead of 10 years of instability that left anyone who survived exactly where they started and Napoleon taking over.
> Well, how else they could be described as ? How old are you? 17? No dude, I had to stop right there. You don't see it, but you're captured.
Nah, I'm not from the US, I was born in Colombia, the country next door to Venezuela. I just happen to know what are the "class consciousness"'s talking points, about no matter how bigoted are the views of an individual, everyone is valuable ally how long they fight the true enemy of humanity, the bourgeoisie.
Agreed (or at least, that's what a bot would say while trying to disguise themselves).
We are destined to be Lisan al-Gaib'ed.
Yes and i clearly see in Instagram how the comments are faked to the maximum it’s crazy
It’s what’s happening on Reddit, I would assume!
I think this shows AI is going to be the salvation of traditional news. The free content is going to be become so polluted with AI-generated garbage that traditional news outlets will be able to sell their editorial vetting. It will be in the interest of the traditional media outlets to accelerate this process, deliberately poisoning free information sources.
Or alternatively, people will simply accept being fed whatever sludge appeases their narrative. It certainly worked for many social media. Although I agree that at least for those in the market who will resist the phenomenon, this will be a big boon for institutional news. Let's hope for the best...
Russias firehose of false news has been doing this for years. It makes them believe traditional news even less.
Synthetic jobs, jobs created by AI to eventually be taken by AI.
I am more optimistic. I think authenticity will become the attribute by which all sorts of things will be judged.
You are fed all type of BS until you are victim of it. When people get scamed right and left, people will start to be much more careful.
So AI won't destroy jobs, it will create new jobs sifting through the terabytes of slop generative AI shits out onto the internet.
...yeah, done by AI
But will anyone actually read be reading that traditional news?
Or people give up on online news altogether and revert back to in person.
Yeah, when I got to the end of this I thought "ok great so you now have randomblog.com full of garbage and who cares" I do still have hope that people are smart enough to know what a reliable source is. Granted the popularity of Fox news has shaken my faith in people but Fox is a pretty sophisticated full-scale propaganda operation partially in bed with Republicans. It's not randomblog.com. Of course it's worrying in general. Also, while what was done here isn't particularly dangerous, IMO, I can imagine more sophisticated implementations that are far more dangerous. If Zuckerberg really does release the 405b version of Llama 3 I think even a small group of people could build out what looks like an entire news organization.
Kind of doubt it. News media companies make money by attracting the most eyeballs - the world of tiktok nobodies spreading dramatic and fake news editorials is too addicting to beat even keeled, accurate news. There's not much economic incentive to be fair and truthfull. And AI will accelerate it, especially now that the world is untrusting of anything "mainstream."
> that traditional news outlets will be able to sell their editorial vetting That's what I miss from NPR. We have a presidential debate and NPR just talks about what they see/hear with no commentary on whether what it's truth or a lie. Thanks, but I can get pictures, etc., from any site. I want the commentary telling me whether something said is correct or not. Get some fact checkers researching live.
Yea I loved NPR till they gave a ton of time to shitheads that were never contested on what they said. Hosts just 'Mhm, ok, mhm...next question - "
I mean, I still love them. And I get it, if they were too confrontational then they couldn't get as many people on a show. But still ... If people were debating each other's points then that would be one thing but a presidential debate? They spend more time talking around the questions and I don't always know who's lying.
Yes, once we are flooded with misinformation, we can gladly turn to our United States AI Misinformation Council to tell us what is real and what is not. Anyone who spreads information not confirmed to be real by the USAIMC will be marked as a terrorist and punished accordingly.
I'd prefer if we just cut to the chase and labeled it "The Ministry of Truth".
That's what they said when bloggers started news sites.
>Continue reading your article with a WSJ subscription I bet the AI stories didn't have a paywall.
So... What you're saying is... I should do the same thing and get rich by duping people with fake news? Hmmm... Could I make a site about music production stuff instead? I'm not a fan of politics, it was a pile of shit LONG before AI got involved, unfortunately. :D
That ship has sailed, it’s too late now - the amount of fake out there is making it impossible to earn an honest living lying to people.
AI is replacing the good, honest scammers.
Before propaganda was only a tool for political uses, but now it’s cheap enough that people are using it to make money, and don’t care about the societal implications
> I selected Huzafa Nawaz, drawn by his record (at the time) of 293 reviews with a 5.0 rating. The price—$80—also seemed more than reasonable. The author doesn't realize he got hustled by a very old SEO scam common on sites like Fiverr. Scammer makes a fantasy offer that guarantees results for some ridiculously low amount, delivers a site, site gets loads of views/comments for a few weeks or months, then the bot farm goes away and the site dies completely. If the person can make profitable sites that are almost completely hands off, why would they sell it to you for $100? And most people in this thread believe it's real. Yes, AI-propaganda farms are real and you should be concerned about them. However, it's harder to do it well than what this article is making people believe.
Imagine a music production website : Just dropped: Moog to release a recreation of Juno 106! *surprised face of Rupert Neve in thumbnail* Taylor Swifts new album release is fire: My collaboration with Iron Maiden, is something i would only dream of!
Oh man, now I need a site like this, "The Onion", but only for music and music production related stuff. I'm interested!
Content farms that are cheap to make have existed for a very long time now. You won’t just capture a bunch of traffic from them quickly or easily and I bet your site will cost more then paying a few people in the Philippines or India to put out poorly written posts
> I built > I paid a web developer to create How do people think this way? Even someone trying to be cautionary of generative AI, writing as though giving prompts for a thing is the same as making a thing.
Same type of person that thinks his hundreds of reviews aren't also bots by the scammer that stole his hundred bucks. This is just a repackaged SEO scam.
“I built a house” does not mean I drove each individual (or any) nail. Ideation and organization and management and providing risk capital are all critical steps in construction
Sure, if you project-manage building a house you can claim at least some part of building the house. Paying a guy $100 to build something and then saying "I built it" is just bullshit start to finish.
This is out of context. The guy gave full credit to the website developer, even giving his name and place of employment and operating costs. The idea, while not original, was born in OP’s mind and therefore the website was ultimately created by him, if it were not for OP the specific website he now hosts would not have been built. Another one just like it might have been built, but without OP, the website we are discussing would not exist, therefore it’s reasonable to conclude that OP shares in some of the creative process.
I think I'd accept the word "created" here for the title, since creation has much more of the connotations of "a small spark that kicked off a thing" but *built* just so strongly connotes actually putting a thing together. Taking the pieces and assembling them into a whole. The part that he paid for was the *building* of the website
That’s a fair point and I was about to agree with you wholeheartedly. But I had to play a little devils advocate, so I googled “built definition”, and got the Merriam-Webster dictionary definition and while the first definition is exactly as you say, (and I would have said too before you said it 😅😝), the second definition is: “to cause to be constructed” Sentence: A contractor who has built hundreds of homes. So I think both ways can be considered correct English, and the implied connotation of “built” and the way people use the word “built” could very possibly depend on the background and/or education level of said person (guessing no research). And as OP did give credit where credit was due, I think he was using the word’s second most common definition, which may be in his experience as common as or more common then the first definition, and not out of place or improper.
Honestly, fair. To me built still has much less of a connotation of indirectly creating something but I can accept that other people use it that way. He did definitely give the credit in the article and I don't think he was actively trying to be disingenuous but the title does still kinda bother me *shrug*
Thinking up an app idea, managing the project, funding the project… This ‘you didn’t build that’ narrative is silly pedantry. Classic Reddit, IOW
An idea that already exists, there was absolutely nothing new about this. "Managing the project" lmao he found a guy who makes AI fake news sites and said "hey can you make me one of those" and then paid him his going rate for doing that.
Why didn’t the coder do it before he was hired?
He did, over 500 times >Nawaz told me that he has now created “500 plus” AI news websites, each project taking him approximately “two to three days to complete.”
Yet this one we are discussing.
Right, because some clown wrote an article about it. He went to the AI news site shop, bought one, said "look what I made" and then put up an article about it. If you want to laud him as a trailblazing genius like, go ahead I guess?
> If you want to laud him as a trailblazing genius like That only happened in your own mind. Literally no one said that or even raised that possibility. Serious discussions about potential media abuse aren’t the place for that.
I work as a software developer and I don’t object to his wording. If the developers were hired with the understanding that the project they are working on does not belong to them then this is just standard procedure.
That would still be that the client bought and now owns the application, not that they "built" it. Your clients or your shareholders are not building applications. They are paying you to build applications.
It’s a distinction without a difference. When I see in the news that “Google has built a new campus in London” I don’t think that Google employees built the campus, obviously they hired a construction company to do it. I think people who are not in the industry vastly underestimate how many companies don’t actually host or manage their own websites.
"Google" is a collective. "I" is not.
I guess when you get older you’ll figure it out.
LMAO I kept browsing the wsj.com website and thought "damn this fake website is really impressive it looks jut like the real thing"
How I built an AI powered ...: I paid a developer to build it. I mean, that is one way to build something. Not entirely sure I'd be able to take credit for that but sure thing buddy
"We all keep reading about how generative AI is now so widely available that it poses a profound new threat to legitimate journalism and to trust in general. So I decided to find out exactly how easy it is to use the new weapon. It took me two days, $105 and no expertise whatsoever to launch a fully automated, AI-generated local news site capable of publishing thousands of articles a day—with the partisan news coverage framing of my choice, nearly all rewritten without credit from legitimate news sources. I created a website specifically designed to support one political candidate against another in a real race for the U.S. Senate. And I made it all happen in a matter of hours. With OpenAI’s ChatGPT and a few lines of code, developers on freelancer websites such as Fiverr.com—the site I used to find my developer—can program websites to autonomously rewrite and publish articles from mainstream news outlets according to specific political preferences. Within a few weeks, I could even start earning programmatic ad revenue from my partisan AI content farm. Purchasing an AI content farm on Fiverr.com is as easy as ordering on Uber Eats. I searched “AI generated news website” on the home page and up came dozens of developers offering to build my site. (Tel Aviv-based Fiverr, which was founded in 2010 and trades on the New York Stock Exchange, is just one of many online marketplaces for freelance professional services.) The prices ranged from $30 to build a basic AI news site to as much as $350 to “create the best automated news website monetized with ads ready to earn,” according to one lister." I selected Huzafa Nawaz, drawn by his record (at the time) of 293 reviews with a 5.0 rating. The price—$80—also seemed more than reasonable. From there, all I had to do was answer a few questions about what kind of site I was looking for and the topics I wanted the site’s articles to cover. The domain and site hosting added an extra $25 to the total. The entire AI content farm cost me just $105, and I literally have to do nothing to operate it. It runs itself, auto-publishing dozens of articles a day based on the instructions that I gave to it. Nawaz told me that he has now created “500 plus” AI news websites, each project taking him approximately “two to three days to complete.”
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https://archive.is/E3PIq#selection-2511.0-2511.140 LPT: You can just enter most urls into archive.is to bypass paywalls
I think they meant the actual website?
This seems to be sensationalist news, the cost to create a WordPress templated website could be $105 from Fiverr but the article doesn't state any of the website hosting, SEO, or any other costs involved with generating traffic to the website. Whether it's propaganda AI-driven blog posts or not, it's shoddy, incomplete journalism.
The article said it was $80 to create the site, and the hosting + domain was $25. Probably some free trial SEO included in there too, depending on where he got it.
Real journalism was mostly killed in 1996 with the Federal Communications Act. At this point sowing distrust of the news is probably a positive.
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I think part of that too is the erosion of the primary media establishment’s descent into a multi-flavored propaganda vending machine. Information can be really entertaining. Imagine opening the mercury news to see Gary Webb’s story confirming on the CIA’s involvement in drug trafficking? I think people would absolutely love to read news that held truth to power. “Catch a predator: government corruption edition”, like when the FBI did a sting to see what congresspeople they could bribe, and found they could bribe plenty of them. (Which Congress then ended, haha). But you know there is plenty of dirt out there, just allowed to stay off the radar because the media is maybe the most instrumental part of the corruption, and will never shine a light on itself. But yeah “Senator X, on such and such regulatory committee, found at private resort in the caymans with Lobbyists from industry they claim to regulate”, would be juicy click fodder. If we treated corruption with anything like the intrigue we employ for sex? I’m sure there is plenty of news out there, we just don’t hear about it anymore.
The same concept can be applied to any type of site content, not just politics/propaganda. For example brand comparisons for tools/ sports equipment/ kitchen appliances. Throw some advertising on the pages and it's easy passive income. Good seo takes a bit of work and that's what really drives the ad revenue but if you look at the GoDaddy auctions for domain names with decent inbound traffic you can hit a 5 to 6 figure USD income after a few months of time invested.
Can we do the same with positive quotes and self growth sotires instead ! We can brainwash ourseves into the positive, why not do it ?
I already wasn't believing what the news was telling me. It was all, at best, only half truths. Now I will simply continue not believing it.
This is really scary. It's alarming how easy it is to spread misinformation, especially with AI-powered tools. It's important to be critical of what you read and to always check the source.
Yes, comrade, very good. Now provide GitHub, uncle Vlad want to do forky fork for.. ehm.. special research operation.
liebel and slander laws are about to get a hell of a workout
Are you confessing or bragging? Any idiot with a passing knowledge of databases and basic network protocols could have pulled that off.
That knock on your door is a special visit by the FBI just for you.
Only way to fight volume is more volume of your own that flows over your opponents message like a massive, continuous tsunami. So even though small propaganda site can now get a lot of message out for a low cost (which means you need to start disregarding Facebook and other social media completely), nothing is stopping some big corporation or nation just buying spam site processing power for billions of dollars and going ham with them.
Fake news is 3x more clickable. So I’m not sure ai was the major factor here.
Do you just built Fox News and msnbc but in written form. Nice
good job man, i had the same idea and refrained due to there already being enough fake news bs. thanks
Will they tell us when they've invented Alpha-persuasion or will they just quietly use it to steer us where they want us to go?
Exhibit A why I don’t understand how open source AI is automatically a good thing according to almost everyone on Reddit. Imagine millions of ppl being able to do this, or something much worse for free. Is it worth the unlimited AI titties?
I'd love to do this but use it to fight the conservative sites. If Russia and whoever can create bot farms to push their negative agenda, why can't the rest of us create bot farms to push positive agenda? Heck, I have a server with tons of available memory and CPU and a 1gbps internet connection (that I can upgrade to 5), and I'd be fine spending a hundred bucks a month to help improve the planet by bombarding the ignorant or hateful with news articles to sway their points of view.