Paperwall: Chinese websites posing as local news outlets target global audiences (2024)
It would appear https://theeditorial.news is "Under Construction" now. The articles themselves [1] were originally super creepy when you know the entire thing is made up.
> Michelle Quaid is fifty-two years old, the mother of two grown children, and she began working at the Commercial-News in 1999
> Quaid wore a polo shirt with the paper's logo — a stylized 'C' — over her heart.
She's not real! None of it is! Truly bizarre and unnerving. I'd love if we got a follow-up, eventually.
Why only rural newspapers and South China Sea?
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20260629011021/https://theeditor...
And yes, I said both.
Cambridge Analytics is going to seem like a child's toy compared to how targeted, how sophisticated this will be. Why have 20 or 30 stories tailored to specific groups of humans, when you can have stories rendered on the fly for individuals, targetting all their greatest fears and folly.
I can imagine someone's loved one dying of cancer a month before the election, and both sides using targetted stuff claiming that the other guy actually caused the cancer somehow.
If there's one thing I've seen in my life, is that there's no such concept as "too low" or "too scummy" for politicians.
CA was accused to literally causing three civil wars in third world nations. I often wonder, will the US have the honour of being the first in the West to fall apart due to misinformation?
I really liked some scifi book I read, where the person appointed to be president for 4 years, was determined to hate the very idea of having the job. Didn't want it. Yet was also very driven.
It’s really hard to build a coherent pro-AI argument
Ultimately, a lot of topic-du-jour punditry is a hustle for clicks.
Contribute to enshittify the internet -> have your real-life reputation, finances, career prospects etc negatively affected. Same if it's nation states.
As it stands, people could pull this crap 100s of times, while still profiting financially and look like operating a respectable ad agency / consultancy / whatever business.
It's reasonable to expect stories the real local press finds discussion worthy (because they are both false and relevant to the local press) are an effective way of using the local press to throw more link strength at their own site.
00 you seed some articles
10 wait for traffic
20 bot fetches GA / GSC
30 bot analysis what works what does not
40 instructed to create more of what works
50 more ai slop that works in search / social
60 Go To 10
aka a "positive" / unchallenged feedback loop
content cost dismissible - cents per article
it's quite cringe, like a not-so-subtle troll on the people who share the image
"AI fake news complaining about how AI fake news is the beginning of a low-trust world" was also an option.
Sarcasm aside, I enjoy the irony.
To me, there is no difference between AI fake news, podcasts as news, influencers "informing", or celebrity talking heads streaming commentary about current events. Its all garbage. Whether OpenAI computers make it up, or a podcaster presents their opinion as fact, the result is the same. We are all susceptible to being influenced by it as if it were news.
That is horrifying and destroys jobs, removes expertise from the world, and makes our lives worse.
I do not see how AI could be a net positive either.
agree, given that we have a natural tendency to believe what we read - or only comprehend what we believe [1].
[1] https://bear.warrington.ufl.edu/brenner/mar7588/Papers/gilbe...
Meaningless corporate presentations, most documents used for hiring and job searching, content on business sites that probably doesn't need to be there, etc. AI at least speeds that up given society's reluctance to get rid of it altogether.
I guess it can also be used to speed up rote work that doesn't really feel engaging but needs to be anyway, or as a Google equivalent for people that don't know the terminology needed to find information about a topic.
But at the end of the day, AI is basically the very definition of the lowest common denominator. Or maybe the most average one.
So, if you're not particularly interested in something, know nothing about how it works or have no talent for it whatsoever, AI is almost like magic. If you do know how it works, then it's often laughably bad.
I thought this piece was realistic and hopeful:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/06/ai-open-ai-anthrop...
I can't control how the world uses AI, but my family and friends have been using it to start new businesses, finally resolve some long-term medical mysteries, and plan trips they wouldn't have otherwise.
finally resolve some long-term medical mysteries
There is your “pro” argument.
The “con” argument would be all the other ways dynamite has been twisted and used since.
This AI stuff is neither good or bad, it is a tool. The people using it are either good or bad.
Ads needed to sell products
Social media sells lots of ads around content
Content is expensive because you need to revenue share with the people that make it
AI makes content for free
Ad sales margin goes up
Tech companies make most of their money selling ads around content and they needed a way to increase margin so they created a content making machine.
it will hopefully eviscerate the petite bourgeoisie and the bohemians.
Like, I personally find python pandas documentation unusable because they don't come with examples next to the function definition. (historically at least, maybe they have changed)
So I was left flailing, trying to cobble something together that was even capable of running without error, much less emitting the output I wanted.
Now that an LLM has badly-memorized 80% of the documentation and can generate 3 different attempts in 5 seconds, I'm free to focus on the actual problem I am working on rather than guessing at syntax for something I use less than once a week.
So I see at least the ability to have a on-demand tutor or sounding board, at any time of day, for pennies, to be a boon for anyone who wants to learn a bit or try reaching for something just outside of their current understanding.
Changes in the media environment began with radio, the reduction of funding, the decision of some media channels to move away from factual reporting, and then the internet.
Verification is expensive, and the death of local news and consolidation of news, has been eroding the ability of the market place of ideas to have ideas compete fairly.
Once the internet came out, the end of classifieds was the death knell for most journalism. Even today the NYT manages stays afloat because of its games, not because people pay for journalism.
Sadly, it is even cheaper to report on things when you don’t care about accuracy
I remember how environmental science was eviscerated on Fox, and the amazing “teach the controversy” angle of attack against evolution, to push forward creationism and intelligent design.
I highly recommend Network Propaganda by Yochai Benkler and co. Not only do they provide a history of how the American media environment changed, but they also gather and analyze data on how social media use and media consumption intersect.
There was a brief period where information was difficult to copy and distribute without exposing one’s self to liability for copyright infringement, and the barrier to access that information was high enough such that you could convince people to pay you. Neither of those dynamics apply today.
Yes, this.
I used to think AI news summaries would kill it, but having tried Kagi news (first impressions as a daily driver for a week), I no longer think so, particularly because Kagi are doing everything right.
Nearly everything I could think of is in there, yet it still feels unsatisfying and oddly less informative (perhaps because I'm less engaged?). Kagi builds a summary from multiple sources, cites the sources, and extracts various impacts/angles (business, technical, industry, historical, etc.) and different party reactions, etc., and more. Yet...
I really don't know what it is and I'll have to use it more to try to identify it. My current conjecture is that it is still more satisfying and informative to read a reporter's view of the event, even if I disagree with it, than a homogenized summary.
I'm also finding similar reactions to articles where I can tell parts are just lifted from the AI — it breaks my engagement with the story/report (kind of like a badly done cinema film breaks my suspension of disbelief and disengages my attention from the story).
I live in an area with three world-class hospitals, still had to wait 16 months to follow-up with a hematologist about bloodwork.
If we aren't going to fix overregulation, undersupply, and insurance, AI is the best the bottom 80% can do for a lot of medical queries too complex for the time and attention they are allotted with the doctor. I see that as a positive.
No, no that doesn't work. Nobody thinks that.
"Drunk people who do it think that!"
You framed your comment as a 3rd party, not the idiot driving drunk, the above 'argument' doesn't hold water.
Yeah, obviously. It was a sarcastic reply to a nonsense argument of “there are no bad things only bad people”