It Looked Like a Reliable News Site. It Was an A.I. Chop Shop.
It Looked Like a Reliable News Site. It Was an A.I. Chop Shop.
BNN Breaking had millions of readers, an international team of journalists and a publishing deal with Microsoft. But it was full of error-ridden content.
Without paywall: https://archive.ph/XB1fs
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
Born in India and raised in Northern California, Mr. Chahal made millions in the online advertising business in the early 2000s and wrote a how-to book about his rags-to-riches story that landed him an interview with Oprah Winfrey.
Over the past year, BNN racked up numerous complaints about getting facts wrong, fabricating quotes from experts and stealing content and photos from other news sites without credit or compensation.
The increasing popularity of programmatic advertising — which uses algorithms to automatically place ads across the internet — allows A.I.-powered news sites to generate revenue by mass-producing low-quality clickbait content, said Sander van der Linden, a social psychology professor and fake-news expert at the University of Cambridge.
“We’re no longer getting any slice of the advertising cake, which used to support our journalism, but are left with a few crumbs,” said Anton van Zyl, the owner of the Limpopo Mirror in South Africa, whose articles, it seemed, had been rewritten by BNN.
Before ending its agreement with BNN Breaking, Microsoft had licensed content from the site for MSN.com, as it does with reputable news organizations such as Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal, republishing their articles and splitting the advertising revenue.
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