As the internet has become the go-to place for most people to find news and information there has been a rise in organized efforts to create fake news and misinformation on a large scale — these are what are referred to as Troll Farms. They're like sweatshops for news articles — oftentimes meant to misinform — that have come to be known as 'pink slime' websites.
They are essentially websites that are created to look like legitimate, often local, news sources but are really an effort to trick people who visit them into thinking the news they present is coming from actual journalists, when in reality they are overt attempts to misinform and often to sow division.
With advances in Generative AI and easy access to Large Language Models like ChatGPT it’s now possible to create pink slime websites that don’t even require much human intervention to pump out lots of news content. And the content isn't necessarily completely fabricated — but often reworked versions of actual news stories but written through whatever partisan lens the site’s owner directs it to use.
Our guest went through the process of having one of these AI Content Farms built to see how the process works. He wrote about the experience for the Wall Street Journal in April in a piece titled “How I Built an AI-Powered, Self-Running Propaganda Machine for $105.” Jack Brewster is Enterprise Editor for NewsGuard — it’s a service that uses human journalists to rate and review the reliability of online news sources. He has also written about politics for Time Magazine, Newsweek, Vice News, and the New York Daily News.
We talk with him about his project (the site he built is not available to the public but hidden behind a password) and about the increasingly troubling trends we’re facing when it comes to the ease of creating online misinformation.
Guest:
Jack Brewster, Enterprise Editor for NewsGuard
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