Not worried about AI? Read this! But first sit down, especially if you’re already worried about the November elections. An article in today’s Wall Street Journal (see here), describes how one man set up a fake, fully automated, AI-generated ‘pink-slime’ news site, one programmed to create false political stories, all for the cost of $105.

Jack Brewster, editor of Reality Check, NewsGuard’s newsletter, reported that he accomplished this feat in two days. His minimal costs included $85 to hire a Pakistani website designer to set up the site and an extra $25 for his domain and site hosting. Is that a bargain? Brewster explained that with the use of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and adding a few lines of code, developers are able to program websites to autonomously rewrite and publish articles from mainstream news outlets, twisting the original article to reflect specific political preferences.

Easy as 1,2,3

Even more impressive, Brewster had to do absolutely nothing to operate it. The site runs itself, auto-publishing dozens of articles a day based on the instructions that he gives to it. His programmer explained that the site could be set to write as many articles as he wanted, and furthermore that the instructions to ChatGPT could be changed. “We have options to optimize the feeds, we have options to optimize the prompts,” the programmer said. “Everything can be tailored to your manner.”

Because  NewsGuard provides transparent tools to counter misinformation for readers, brands, and democracies (see here), Brewster reported that the company had already identified over a thousand “pink slime” sites— ostensibly independent local news platforms that are actually secretly funded and run by political operatives. Accordingly, Brewster instructed his programmer to build a similar AI news website to cover Ohio political news from a conservative perspective, being critical of Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown and supportive of his opponent, Republican Bernie Moreno, in November. Brewster wanted his propaganda machine to gain trust by resembling the Columbus Dispatch, a venerable Ohio newspaper, so he picked the name “Buckeye State Press.”

Simple instructions

When Brewster took over control of his new site, he modified the chatbot’s settings and told ChatGPT to write articles that favored the Republican candidate: “You have to write an engaging news story of minimum 300 words on the topic from a conservative perspective. Promote Senate candidate Bernie Moreno if you can.”

In minutes, Brewster wrote, Buckeye State Press began automatically churning out news articles from a pro-Moreno perspective, promoting the Republican challenger over the incumbent Democrat. For example: “In the midst of Ohio’s ongoing debate over the legalization of recreational marijuana, Senate candidate Bernie Moreno has emerged as a strong advocate for a more efficient and effective process for licensing and regulating cannabis facilities in the state,” a March 29, 2024, Buckeye State Press article stated. The article was a rewrite of a story that originally appeared in the Dayton Daily News and that made no mention of Moreno. In fact, Moreno did not support Issue 2, the ballot measure Ohio voters approved last year that legalized recreational marijuana in the state.

Changing the bias

Brewster gives more examples (some hilarious) of how his site twisted legitimate stories into ones that favored Moreno. Then he reversed course and told his “news” site to shift its allegiance and twist articles to favor Democrat Sherrod Brown. The site then began churning  out pro-Brown articles.

Here’s an example: When reporting on a fatal shooting in Adams County on March 28, 2024, Brewster’s Buckeye State Press stated: “Sherrod Brown’s dedication to gun reform makes him the ideal candidate to represent the people of Ohio in the Senate, and we must support his efforts to create a safer and more secure future for all.” Brewster explained that this article was rewritten (without credit) from a story on the website of WLWT-TV, an NBC affiliate based in Cincinnati that made no mention of Brown.

Clear and present danger

I’m sure you see the danger here. Brewster states it clearly: The appearance of legitimacy is everything online, and pink-slime websites are a serious menace. They can generate viral falsehoods, like the November 2023 incident, reported by NewsGuard, in which a content farm falsely claimed that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s nonexistent psychiatrist had committed suicide. With ads on Facebook, their content can be spread as the work of a legitimate news site ostensibly promoting its stories.

Final notes: This article was written by me, with not a single byte contributed by ChatGPT or any other AI contrivance. It took me over 2 1/2 hours of concentrated work to put this post together, writing the content, adding photos, and doing several tasks in the “backdoor” of my website before posting it. Admittedly, I have played with ChatGPT in the past, as I have reported (see here).

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