• by Ray Schultz , June 8, 2023

NewsGuard has launched what it calls an ”Unreliable AI-Generated News Tracking Center,” to identify the use of generative AI to turbocharge misinformation operations and low-quality content farms. 

The tracking center highlights NewsGuard’s reports, including those that identified Russian and Chinese state-media citing AI-generated text as authority to advance false claims, NewsGuard says. 

NewsGuard has identified 150 “Unrelated AI-Generated News” sites (UAINs)—"low-quality news sites that are either mostly or entirely produced by artificial intelligence, with little or no human oversight,” NewsGuard says.  

“One of the reasons we launched NewsGuard five years ago was because of the cheap and easy nature of content farms,” said NewsGuard co-CEO Steven Brill. “Today’s AI-generated ‘news’ websites are akin to the misinformation-spreading Macedonian content farms from a few years ago, with the distinction that these new sites cost even less to produce and can become even more prolific with the enhancements of artificial intelligence.” 

“Most of these sites were created with the business model of generating revenue from programmatic advertising, which seems to be working,” adds Gordon Crovitz, NewsGuard co-CEO.

Crovitz adds, “Brands don’t intend to place ads on these brand-unsafe sites, but the opaque system that operates programmatic advertising means these ads appear through ad-tech firms such as Google. No marketer intends to advertise on these sites, but ads will appear on these brand-unsafe sites unless brands access exclusion lists that include this newest example of misinformation.” 

Generative AI will allow more players to leverage the estimated $2.6 billion of advertising market tied to misinformation news sites, according to  NewsGuard and Comscore.