AI chatbots have been used to create hundreds of news websites
Consider Hollywood’s evolving villains over the years: Nazis, Russians, South African white nationalists, Middle Eastern terrorists, South American drug lords, dinosaurs, aliens, Wall Street cutthroats, and, now, Tim Robbins.
It’s Robbins as creepy “Bernard,” a dour IT director in “Silo,” an Appletv+ sci-fi series about thousands of people living underground for reasons they do not understand — and that Bernard is loath to explain.
An IT boss as bad guy (so far) taps into our growing cultural anxiety about technology, be it a threat to jobs or the expansion of artificially generated misinformation.
The apprehension was even evident at the University Club of Chicago the other night during a discussion of development on the South and West sides. There, Discover Financial Services Chief Executive
Officer Roger Hochschild detailed a giant new South Side call center built by the Riverwoods-based banking and payments giant, which has 30 million customers worldwide and 20,000 employees.
When the floor opened to questions, the first two had nothing to do with development or shameful poverty. They were about how Discover uses artificial intelligence.
A heretofore esoteric topic is now mainstream. It includes stories such as “Microsoft’s AI reaches Indian villages,” and a Chicago sports radio host fretting about how the chatbot CHATGPT spit out a 14-page paper on the French Revolution for her sixth grader.
The unease was the catalyst for a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, featuring Sam Altman founder of San Francisco startup Openai, the creator of CHATGPT.
My colleagues at Newsguard, which tracks online misinformation and rates the credibility of news sources, did a pleasant double-take as Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar, the daughter of a journalist, brought up AI’S potential perils to witness Gary Marcus, a professor emeritus of psychology and neural science at New York University.
“A lot of news is going to be generated by these systems,” Marcus, who was sitting next to Altman, said. “They are not reliable. Newsguard already has a study … showing that something like 50 websites are already generated by bots …. the quality of the sort of overall news market is going to decline as we have more generated content by systems that aren’t actually reliable.”
In fact, Newsguard has identified more than 125 websites, ranging from news to lifestyle reporting and published in 10 languages, with substantial content written by AI tools. They include a health information portal that has published more than 50 Ai-generated articles offering medical advice, some imprecise or even bogus, including on subjects such as endstage bipolar disorder.
Some sites have respectable-sounding names such as News Live 79, Daily
Business Post, ibusiness Day, Ireland Top
of treatment, but after a decade, 80% are still alive. The researchers are now starting a larger study.
That’s one of several breast cancer vaccines that Disis is developing, with the idea that showing they work to keep cancer from coming back is just the first step in moving them into earlier stages of disease — and eventually prevention.
Others are already moving into studies of vaccines that could prevent disease in people with a high risk of developing breast cancer. In general, those trials are vaccinating women about to undergo preventive mastectomies so that they can look for an immune response in tissue removed during surgery. Then, of course, they will need to follow
those women for years to understand if that immune response is enough to keep cancer at bay.
In March, Domcheck vaccinated the first three healthy women who harbor BRCA mutations that put them at high risk of developing cancer. Before their mastectomy, the volunteers were given a shot that teaches the immune system to see an enzyme called telomerase, which is turned up too high in cancer cells.
And in February, researchers at the Cleveland Clinic similarly began vaccinating women who do not have breast cancer but carry mutations like BRCA or PALB2. The shot they get before surgery teaches their immune system to recognize a protein that normally is only made when women are lactating,
but seems to reappear in triple-negative breast cancers — one of the most aggressive forms of the disease. If it works, their vaccine could be safe for women who are past their child-bearing years.
Proving these vaccines can prevent cancers eventually will require large, late-stage studies — the kind academic centers can’t typically afford. “It’s going to take advocates, patients, and funding to get this type of work done,” Domchek says.
As these studies wind through the clinic, any promising data should motivate investment in an area that could bring us close to the vision of a world with a lot less cancer in it.
Patients are doing their part. Lee Wilke, an oncologist at University of Wisconsin’s UW Health
who is leading a phase 2 study of one of Disis’ vaccines, says she has a long list of people who’d like to roll up their sleeves for the trial.
Wilke routinely performs mastectomies and is more than ready for the day when vaccines allow women to make different choices about their health. Maybe a vaccine can allow women with a high risk of developing breast cancer to delay surgery until after they’ve had children. Maybe it’ll eventually mean forgoing surgery altogether and living cancer-free. “I keep telling my colleagues in research and pharmacology: Please, put me out of business,” she says.
And while I normally wouldn’t wish for anyone’s unemployment, to me that sounds like a pretty good goal.