Here’s What AI-Generated Media Looks Like

Are you sure you’re reading content produced by a human?

Most probably if you’re up to speed with the latest technological advances, your answer would be “of course not”.

But what if we’re talking about a proper AI content-filled news site?

Now before we go any further, let us clarify that they indeed exist. What’s more, there are many of them, according to NewsGuard, a service for tracking and assessing media outlets. 

While in May 2023, the service identified 49 websites, already in July 2023, their number increased to 347, spanning 13 languages: Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, Indonesian, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Tagalog, Thai, and Turkish.

Some of them spread info that is relatively alright even if it sounds like incoherent gibberish. Others, however, pose a greater threat as they disseminate info which is misleading our outright false. Or worse, AI-generated too like the recent image claiming to show an explosion near the Pentagon building in Washington. 

The explosion never took place, with experts confident that the image has been produced digitally.

Let’s take the example of iBusiness Day, which offers a glimpse into this fascinating world of AI gibberish positioned as news.

It suffices to open the site to see that there is something very off about it. Unless we’re to assume that its content manager is very lazy or likes to take coffee while reading The New York Times, there is really no explanation why the same picture is used for completely different articles.

To understand what it feels like to read an artificial text, we decided to open ashutoshbhattacharya94’s Guide of Understanding the Differences Between a List and a Tuple in Python that contains a grammatical error already in the headline.

Once we started reading it, it turned out that the article contains 13 subsections of short-sentenced paragraph with repetitive and incoherent info, coupled with bizarre mistakes. And not just grammatical ones – which is best illustrated by the conclusion section. 

After explaining in very broad terms what the difference between tuples and lists is, the “author” concludes: “we’ll look at how the difference between list and tuple. This post compares and contrasts two frequently used Python data structures: lists and tuples. Knowing the subtle difference between list and tuple data structures is essential. In contrast to lists, tuples never have an inconsistent amount of items. In contrast to tuples, Python lists can expand as needed.” 

The last time we checked conclusions aren’t supposed to contain info of wanting to write an article that’s already been written and thus have a conclusion part. However, the most bizarre part comes where the “author” wishes us “the best of luck”, inviting people to leave a comment in the “space below” and advises to “keep this sentence in mind.” 

Given how mind-boggling the whole article is, it would probably not come as a surprise that there is no space below that text. Still, we’ll promise that we “keep this sentence in mind.”

Then there are the ads featured on the site. 

In one of them, a man allegedly represents the IFGICT, which claims to be the world’s largest ICT Federation, promoting a white-glove service of issuing “highest quality certification and examination services.” 

But how come this white-glove service, which claims to have an array of high-profile clients like IBM and Capgemini, has a Twitter handle created in 2014 that only has 29 followers coupled with a no less dodgy site? 

And what happened to the  “Summit Conference” (as if summit and conference are not synonymous) in 2020, which only three people agreed to attend on Facebook? 

Furthermore, we checked out its alleged primary location via Google Maps and found out that 900 W Flagler St is home to a barber shop, Envios de Dinero, Beauty Salon, and Tattoo. No multinational company appears to be located there.

Though it’s entirely up to you where you get your certificates, we’d recommend that you really do your homework before reaching out to this company. 

On a sillier note, iBusiness Day, which also happens to have a health section, offers an article by markbrown on going into labor. It’s not like we expected a lot from it after checking out the site, but it still managed to gobsmack us. 

Markbrown, who is presumably a “he”,  deemed it fit to use the slang version of the pronoun “You” –  “U” – and while also adding  some cryptic “Buymedlife” line.

The article then goes on to tell which meds the woman should take in order to alleviate the pain when going into labor. 

We will not mention them here not only because we don’t wish to advertise them, but also because we strongly advise against taking any medication other than the one prescribed by the professional examining your pregnancy. Especially from an outlet who calls you “u”. Even though the article is amusing, it can lead to not-so-amusing results. 

On a final note, remember that the web is rife with fakes, disinformation, and misinformation. Luckily, there’s a myriad of fact-checking services so do try and check info before sharing it with others.

Previously, Gagarin News reported on GPT Language Models.