HI-TECH ROBBERY
AI passes Post story as its own in Google search
Google News searches turn up articles generated by artificial intelligence that brazenly steal from legitimate media outlets — and The Post has already identified at least one such rip-off of its own published work.
Late last week, The Post tested Google News by searching for recent articles about Federal Trade Commission nominee Melissa Holyoak and sorting the results by most recent date of publication.
The Post’s exclusive Jan. 8 story about Holyoak was listed lower in search results than a nearly identical rip-off — published by an outlet with the generic name “Business News” and the bizarre domain address “biz.crast.net” that seemingly cranks out troves of AI-generated articles.
The fake version of the article featured the same artwork — and even included references to “The Post” in its regurgitated copy. The rip-off was attributed to “Shawn Johnson,” whose byline turned up more than 17,800 pages of results and listed as publisher or author of dozens of articles last Friday alone.
By late afternoon Friday, a Google spokesperson confirmed the article “violates our policy and will be removed.”
‘ It’s going to create conditions where it’s going to be impossible to generate any revenue to keep our newsrooms afloat. — Danielle Coffey, CEO of the News/Media Alliance
‘Stolen goods’
Google, helmed by CEO Sundar Pichai, also confirmed that AI-generated content is not against its policies, but that content can be removed if it is determined to be “spam” that was published specifically to rank high in News results.
Independent outlet 404 Media called out the issue last week after obtaining screenshots that showed AI-generated rip-offs — including regurgitations of a “Star Wars”-related post published by Distractify and an article published by Heavy.com about an “executionstyle murder” — appearing alongside real articles in Google News search results.
The spread of AI-generated articles is already a “real problem” for the industry, according to Danielle Coffey, CEO of the News/Media Alliance.
“It’s a broken system because it’s not rewarding the quality human-created content across the board.” Coffey told The Post. “It’s going to create conditions where it’s going to be impossible to generate any revenue to keep our newsrooms afloat.”
Coffey was one of several experts who testified before a Senate panel earlier this month on the dangers AI could pose to the future of journalism. At the same event, Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch said AI chatbots are “built with stolen goods” and should be regulated by Congress.
Google search liaison Danny Sullivan questioned the report’s methodology in a lengthy X thread, asserting that sorting search results by date was “expressingly asking our systems to ignore the regular relevance ranking.”
“The sites in question only appeared for artificially narrow queries, including queries that explicitly filtered out the date of an original article,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement.
Meanwhile, the quality of Google’s search engine results has “gotten worse” due to rampant spam, according to a study by experts at Germany’s Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence.
Google also disputed the study’s findings.