The Rise and Fall of BNN Breaking, an AI-Generated News Outlet (nytimes.com) 38
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The news was featured on MSN.com: "Prominent Irish broadcaster faces trial over alleged sexual misconduct." At the top of the story was a photo of Dave Fanning. But Mr. Fanning, an Irish D.J. and talk-show host famed for his discovery of the rock band U2, was not the broadcaster in question. "You wouldn't believe the amount of people who got in touch," said Mr. Fanning, who called the error "outrageous." The falsehood, visible for hours on the default homepage for anyone in Ireland who used Microsoft Edge as a browser, was the result of an artificial intelligence snafu. A fly-by-night journalism outlet called BNN Breaking had used an A.I. chatbot to paraphrase an article from another news site, according to a BNN employee. BNN added Mr. Fanning to the mix by including a photo of a "prominent Irish broadcaster." The story was then promoted by MSN, a web portal owned by Microsoft. The story was deleted from the internet a day later, but the damage to Mr. Fanning's reputation was not so easily undone, he said in a defamation lawsuit filed in Ireland against Microsoft and BNN Breaking. His is just one of many complaints against BNN, a site based in Hong Kong that published numerous falsehoods during its short time online as a result of what appeared to be generative A.I. errors.
Mr. Fanning's complaint against BNN is one of many. The site based published numerous falsehoods during its short time online.Credit...Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York Times BNN went dormant in April, while The New York Times was reporting this article. The company and its founder did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Microsoft had no comment on MSN's featuring the misleading story with Mr. Fanning's photo or his defamation case, but the company said it had terminated its licensing agreement with BNN. During the two years that BNN was active, it had the veneer of a legitimate news service, claiming a worldwide roster of "seasoned" journalists and 10 million monthly visitors, surpassing the The Chicago Tribune's self-reported audience. Prominent news organizations like The Washington Post, Politico and The Guardian linked to BNN's stories. Google News often surfaced them, too. A closer look, however, would have revealed that individual journalists at BNN published lengthy stories as often as multiple times a minute, writing in generic prose familiar to anyone who has tinkered with the A.I. chatbot ChatGPT. BNN's "About Us" page featured an image of four children looking at a computer, some bearing the gnarled fingers that are a telltale sign of an A.I.-generated image. "How easily the site and its mistakes entered the ecosystem for legitimate news highlights a growing concern: A.I.-generated content is upending, and often poisoning, the online information supply," adds The Times.
"NewsGuard, a company that monitors online misinformation, identified more than 800 websites that use A.I. to produce unreliable news content. The websites, which seem to operate with little to no human supervision, often have generic names -- such as iBusiness Day and Ireland Top News -- that are modeled after actual news outlets. They crank out material in more than a dozen languages, much of which is not clearly disclosed as being artificially generated, but could easily be mistaken as being created by human writers."
Mr. Fanning's complaint against BNN is one of many. The site based published numerous falsehoods during its short time online.Credit...Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York Times BNN went dormant in April, while The New York Times was reporting this article. The company and its founder did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Microsoft had no comment on MSN's featuring the misleading story with Mr. Fanning's photo or his defamation case, but the company said it had terminated its licensing agreement with BNN. During the two years that BNN was active, it had the veneer of a legitimate news service, claiming a worldwide roster of "seasoned" journalists and 10 million monthly visitors, surpassing the The Chicago Tribune's self-reported audience. Prominent news organizations like The Washington Post, Politico and The Guardian linked to BNN's stories. Google News often surfaced them, too. A closer look, however, would have revealed that individual journalists at BNN published lengthy stories as often as multiple times a minute, writing in generic prose familiar to anyone who has tinkered with the A.I. chatbot ChatGPT. BNN's "About Us" page featured an image of four children looking at a computer, some bearing the gnarled fingers that are a telltale sign of an A.I.-generated image. "How easily the site and its mistakes entered the ecosystem for legitimate news highlights a growing concern: A.I.-generated content is upending, and often poisoning, the online information supply," adds The Times.
"NewsGuard, a company that monitors online misinformation, identified more than 800 websites that use A.I. to produce unreliable news content. The websites, which seem to operate with little to no human supervision, often have generic names -- such as iBusiness Day and Ireland Top News -- that are modeled after actual news outlets. They crank out material in more than a dozen languages, much of which is not clearly disclosed as being artificially generated, but could easily be mistaken as being created by human writers."
Seems Legit (Score:1)
Re:Seems Legit (Score:4, Funny)
My iTunes collection has been fucked by U2 since 2014 when "Songs of Innocence" got added and could never be deleted.
In other words you've never... lost your Innocence? /rimshot
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At least MSN isn't MSNBC, which sent out its "reporters" to chase down the jury bus during the Kyle Rittenhouse trial.
Still better than the Fox tabloid which had a discussion if Taylor Swift was a government psyop [msnbc.com] because she was encouraging people to vote.
The story was "deleted from the internet" (Score:3)
Nothing is ever really deleted once it goes online.
Re:The story was "deleted from the internet" (Score:5, Insightful)
There was a guy running a website called Ultra Analog who used to build these amazing looking hifi amplifiers. He was doing new designs and publishing experiments but got pissed off one day and deleted the site. It was never archived by archive.org and no one has saved any mirrors. It's been erased from existence.
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Had not heard of them. How long ago was this ? Was it not linked from anywhere ?
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Here is the site being linked in a forum post
https://www.diyaudio.com/commu... [diyaudio.com]
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If a tree falls in a forest and nobody was there to hear it, did it make a sound?
If a website was published, but it wasn't archived before it was removed, was it really there?
If I don't personally witness a fact, nor was it witnessed by a storyteller I trust, was it ever true?
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If a man talks in a forest an no woman was there to hear it, was he still wrong?
Re:The story was "deleted from the internet" (Score:5, Interesting)
False. There are plenty of things that are borderline impossible to find on the internet these days. There's a fantasy that everything which is posted is replicated or archived somewhere. Many things online have faded into obscurity.
And obscurity is all that is needed. There's a big difference between being on the front page of the MSNBC and being on page 20 of a Google search result. Unless you gain notoriety enough to be replicated / archived, deleting the original virtually does delete it from the internet.
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A 2011 blog post by the Library of Congress cited estimates that the average lifespan of a web page was around 100 days in 2003, up from just 44 days in 1997.
A 2023 Pew Research Center analysis found that 54% of Wikipedia pages had at least one dead link.
Social media sites do not archive links posted by their members. If content correlates with user-clicks, then most of the content of the internet is held in social media and a lot of that is quite tran
I read about these screwups here quite often (Score:2)
But I don't think I've seen any stories like this make it to the mainstream news. And people - normal people - really need to become aware of these potential problems with AI.
Re: I read about these screwups here quite often (Score:2)
what are editors for? (Score:1)
Is it really that difficult for editors to do their job? and for a human to review what is published on a news site?
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Is it really that difficult for editors to do their job? and for a human to review what is published on a news site?
Humans are expensive, and profit margins in journalism are thin.
The better accuracy from human reviewers is unlikely to result in in enough additional revenue to justify the cost.
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most of the stories we hear about with AI making BS stories and getting published are not some no budget entities.. they are actual news publishers with actual editors on staff. The cost is already there. The staff is there. No oversight over what is published is also there. There is no valid reason for this to happen. Especially when your business depends on the accuracy of your reporting.
time for a shit analogy- It's akin to a bakery letting AI create food dishes and the baker not checking if the fo
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If I read this right, there was a correct headline "Prominent Irish broadcaster faces trial over alleged sexual misconduct". And they added the name and picture of a "Prominent Irish broadcaster". The logic mistake is that in this kind of situation you can't just use the name and picture of any "prominent irish broadcaster". Even the correct one is probably legally a risky move, publishing the wrong one is inexcusable. You just _might_ have an e
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No, but it costs money. And hence the AI believers think that is not needed and they can make more money this way.
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yeah, but these sites actually do claim to have editors on staff... so it's not a cost savings.. unless the editors are paid by the word.
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The number of editors matters to cost and to what they actually look at.
Yet another example of... (Score:3)
The main problem is that this is a direct threat to democracy. Nowadays, every politician can dismiss news stories like never before. The media have become partisan cheerleaders & hold nobody to account. They perpetuate & propagate any behaviour by politicians in order to attract clicks rather than to serve the public interest & disregard the consequences. In fact, the consequences become the inspiration for the next stream of fake news to attract yet more clicks & sell more ads.
In this climate, it's relatively easy for the rich & powerful to take advantage & push their hidden agendas without fear of public or legal accountability. Fake news creates a smoke screen behind which our beloved oligarchs can corrupt our democracies to serve their own interests. They typically lean toward extremist views that a good for nobody except themselves; just look at the number of populist, extremist politicians & political parties that have gained ground in recent years. Where do you think they're getting their money & support from?
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Politicians and the media have formed an entire wing of the Fantasy Industrial Complex, as described by Kurt Anderson in "Fantasyland: How America went Haywire." We've allowed the fantasy fetish folks to take over our entire society. And somehow, the vast majority just roll along with it and accept it as how things are. Reality no longer resembles reality. In fact, outside of a very small circle of acquaintances, it's very difficult to tell when someone is speaking if they share a reality with you, or if th
Is this the fake news on dropout? (Score:2)
BNN is on that YouTube comedy channel isn't it?
Chicago Tribune (Score:2)
Wow!
That's more than a bushels worth of whales in fathom deep waters! (and other meaningless comparisons)
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All the evidence for this was chronicled on the Ultra Analog website.
Not mistakes (Score:3)
Misinformation. Deliberate misinformation.
This is information warfare. Spreading lies and then claiming them as mistakes caused by flaws in the system. It foments unrest and distrust in the systems we rely on for our daily lives.
These are deliberate attempts to damage western society.
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