This is true: Microsoft Shamelessly Pumping Internet Full of Garbage AI-Generated “News” Articles (futurism.com)
Microsoft’s Start page allows anyone to submit their web site as a news source. I have looked at over 100 of these web site sources. Many claim to have a large staff of writers – most of which have generic bios that are nonsense. Many have photos of their “staff” – photos which turn out to be available from stock photo agencies, which appear on multiple web sites, with different names of the person in the photo, plus AI generated portrait images. Some sites share the same author photos – but with different names!
Yahoo News also has a portal for submission of web sites as news sources, many of which are the same as those used by Microsoft.
Beginning back around 2008-2010, the print news industry began huge layoffs and began is long march toward oblivion. Many of the writers, back then, created “news” web sites, typically focused on a specific area. Some hire actual writers, sometimes from abroad, and some pay $10-$25 per submitted article. These articles are content bait to collect eyeballs for advertisers. Most articles do not get large readership – but perhaps 10% get syndicated and shared on a viral basis – and that’s enough to get a large ad revenue take.
Some of the articles are written by AI – and some are human edited. Many of the AI articles are re-packaged summaries of content plagiarized from legitimate news sites.
The goal is click bait fluffy pieces to collect eye balls. Along with traditional items like “sex sells”, fear, hysteria, climate fear porn, celebrity gossip, and social media gossip (re-packaging a collection of social media posts as a fake news story), “writers” churn out half a dozen fluff pieces per day.
This is the Microsoft Start page and Yahoo News. Both are publishing links to garbage content that pretends to be journalism – but its just content fluff.
Some legitimate news services (newspapers, local TV stations) have begun to link to these click-bait stories!
Today’s “news” is creative writing nonsense spewed by content mills and AI – all the better to get seen by bored people scrolling through their news feed.
