Over two years ago, I wrote an article about how fake women and fake AI content ruined a major magazine – AI Generated-Content On The Rise. How Sports Illustrated’s use of AI-generated content turned a successful magazine, with a long history of journalistic excellence, into an AI-riddled slopfest that eventually closed. A month ago, Jim Hillier wrote about how AI slop is taking over the web. I hope that it does not get worse, but every day I read an article or view a video, and suspect that what I am looking at is just AI-generated slop.
Today, I read an article that shows how AI has taken this to another level.
The Plagiarism Machine
The article, A Prominent PR Firm Is Running a Fake News Site That’s Plagiarizing Original Journalism at Incredible Scale, in Futurism, by Maggie Harrison Dupré, is about a news site called National Today that is using AI to blatantly plagiarize at an appalling rate. The author’s team analyzed just one day’s worth of articles on National Today and gave up after finding over 300 examples of plagiarism! The plagiarism ranges from top newspapers to local newsrooms across the country, stealing their original reporting and using it to publish a flood of AI-generated articles. But the AI includes bizarre errors and hallucinations.
The authors also found that National Today publishes these plagiarized materials in dozens of sections on sites they created that feature local-sounding titles — NYC Today, Sacramento Today, Cleveland Today, and Harrisburg Today. These are designed to look like local news sites. Google Search and Google News post the content, where it appears alongside local reporting.
Tons Of Errors
If plagiarism isn’t enough, the AI adds AI slop and hallucinations to its articles. For example, an article plagiarized about the recent Artemis 2 moon flight’s astronaut Reid Wiseman dedicating a crater to his wife Carroll Wiseman, who passed away in 2020. National Today referred to the NASA astronaut as “John Doe” and his wife as “Jane Doe”. In another article, they referred to the Governor of Iowa (Kim Reynolds) as, yes, Governor John Doe. And, they even made up a quote from Pope Leo XIV in an article on President Trump, “Jesus probably would not be on board with that”.
Not A Cursory Firm
National Today is run by TOP Agency, a branding and public relations agency that claims to have clients including Budweiser, Williams Sonoma, Albertsons, Sallie Mae, and M&T Bank. Benjamin Kaplan, its CEO, describes it as the “fastest growing viral publicity company in the world.” TOP states that National Today exists to help brands “Create Ownable Viral Moments for your brand and reach 10M consumers, 100K media outlets, and 10K influencers across traditional, digital, and social media.”
Originally
Ironically, it looks like National Today started as a daily holiday and birthday page. It still has this page as its landing page. If you select February 19, you will find that this is Prevent Plagiarism Day. This whole page is about what plagiarism is, the history of plagiarism, and how to prevent plagiarism. Ironic that TOP and National Today never read this page.
Bottom Line
I was amused by the bizarre errors and hallucinations that National Today uses in its articles. However, I was also surprised and saddened to see how low AI has taken us. Unfortunately, many publishers are introducing AI articles to save money. AI can produce text quickly and cheaply, even if it is plagiarized and slop. I can assure you that Dave’s Computer Tips authors are real people producing real content. No AI slop here. Our slop is all human!
Let me know, in the comments, your thoughts on AI’s intrusion into text and video content. Do you notice it? Do you like it?
—
