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How a Small Iowa Newspaper's Website Became an AI-Generated Clickbait Factory
When two former Meta employees dug into why the website of Iowa's Clayton County Register was spewing dubious posts about stocks, they uncovered a network of sites slinging seemingly AI-made content.
Although Eastin and Abraham suspect that the network the Register ’s old site is now part of was created with straightforward money-making goals, they fear that more malicious actors could use the same sort of tactics to push misinformation and propaganda into search results. When Eastin and Abraham started their investigation in November 2023, the journalist database Muck Rack showed that he had bylined an eye-popping 14,882 separate news articles in his “career,” including 50 published the day they checked. While there’s valid concern about how AI might be used as a tool to spread political misinformation, this network demonstrates how content mills are likely to focus on uncontroversial topics when their primary aim is generating traffic-based income.
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