It would appear https://theeditorial.news is "Under Construction" now. The articles themselves [1] were originally super creepy when you know the entire thing is made up.
> Michelle Quaid is fifty-two years old, the mother of two grown children, and she began working at the Commercial-News in 1999
> Quaid wore a polo shirt with the paper's logo — a stylized 'C' — over her heart.
She's not real! None of it is! Truly bizarre and unnerving. I'd love if we got a follow-up, eventually.
The article from archive you link.. scores as mostly human on GPTZero (I tested a random paragraph). That's the issue I've always seen with AI detectors, they might be able to detect direct LLM output, but if you give an article to an AI and tell it write something made up using that format and make it appear like a real story, the detectors will think its real.
You think that's unnerving? Just wait until the mid-terms get fully under motion, nothing is going to compare to the amount of perfect looking BS that will be spread by both parties.
And yes, I said both.
Cambridge Analytics is going to seem like a child's toy compared to how targeted, how sophisticated this will be. Why have 20 or 30 stories tailored to specific groups of humans, when you can have stories rendered on the fly for individuals, targetting all their greatest fears and folly.
I can imagine someone's loved one dying of cancer a month before the election, and both sides using targetted stuff claiming that the other guy actually caused the cancer somehow.
If there's one thing I've seen in my life, is that there's no such concept as "too low" or "too scummy" for politicians.
CA was accused to literally causing three civil wars in third world nations. I often wonder, will the US have the honour of being the first in the West to fall apart due to misinformation?
I really liked some scifi book I read, where the person appointed to be president for 4 years, was determined to hate the very idea of having the job. Didn't want it. Yet was also very driven.
Wait, there's a law that says exactly that about money! Bad money always drives out good money (because the good money gets hoarded). AI as fake money, a funny coincidence.
I can't control how the world uses AI, but my family and friends have been using it to start new businesses, finally resolve some long-term medical mysteries, and plan trips they wouldn't have otherwise.
Easier said than done. Not easy to access or pay for specialists in the US and they don't always communicate with each other well to coordinate care, especially for non life-threatening issues.
I live in an area with three world-class hospitals, still had to wait 16 months to follow-up with a hematologist about bloodwork.
If we aren't going to fix overregulation, undersupply, and insurance, AI is the best the bottom 80% can do for a lot of medical queries too complex for the time and attention they are allotted with the doctor. I see that as a positive.
I suppose if it says something like "Eat more broccoli" and the suggestion works you can assume the answer is accurate.
But for me it's more likely to say "maybe you have xxxx" and I would still need to see a specialist to do tests like colonoscopies to know?
I suffer from one condition with no cure and little literature and every once in a while I've seen on a related subreddit I no longer read "I'm using AI you guys and this AI SLOP will surely help!!!"
I think if I had to find any defence for AI, it's that it provides an efficient way to create things that don't matter, but which society desperately tries to pretend are important somehow.
Meaningless corporate presentations, most documents used for hiring and job searching, content on business sites that probably doesn't need to be there, etc. AI at least speeds that up given society's reluctance to get rid of it altogether.
I guess it can also be used to speed up rote work that doesn't really feel engaging but needs to be anyway, or as a Google equivalent for people that don't know the terminology needed to find information about a topic.
But at the end of the day, AI is basically the very definition of the lowest common denominator. Or maybe the most average one.
So, if you're not particularly interested in something, know nothing about how it works or have no talent for it whatsoever, AI is almost like magic. If you do know how it works, then it's often laughably bad.
AI is like when some fella named Nobel synthesized dynamite. He sure did have good intentions as it relates to safety for workers doing dangerous jobs.
There is your “pro” argument.
The “con” argument would be all the other ways dynamite has been twisted and used since.
This AI stuff is neither good or bad, it is a tool. The people using it are either good or bad.
We have a demographic collapse looming in the horizon in most developed countries. If we find a way to use 1 human instead of 2 to produce the same amount of intellectual work in 10-20 years as we do today, that's a huge societal benefit.
I find it to be a useful tool for summarizing things, creating examples, and as a tutor for explaining a topic using analogies. Plus it can generate and iterate on code snippets.
Like, I personally find python pandas documentation unusable because they don't come with examples next to the function definition. (historically at least, maybe they have changed)
So I was left flailing, trying to cobble something together that was even capable of running without error, much less emitting the output I wanted.
Now that an LLM has badly-memorized 80% of the documentation and can generate 3 different attempts in 5 seconds, I'm free to focus on the actual problem I am working on rather than guessing at syntax for something I use less than once a week.
So I see at least the ability to have a on-demand tutor or sounding board, at any time of day, for pennies, to be a boon for anyone who wants to learn a bit or try reaching for something just outside of their current understanding.
The problem isn't AI. The problem has been the mass fan-out of information and unchecked regulation, people, or algorithms that determine it. AI only makes it worse.
I remarked a couple of times that the same thing crops up on HN. Many high-ranking blog posts about AI appear AI-generated, and the funny thing is that this holds true not only for pro-AI content, but also for anti-AI posts.
Ultimately, a lot of topic-du-jour punditry is a hustle for clicks.
Every time I read a piece from Nieman, it reminds me both of how much we've lost in journalism, but also that there's always hope to swing the pendulum back towards truth (well, more truthiness).
This reads like a nation state driven influence operation focused on feeding propaganda into LLM's and search engines (need to read towards the end to get to that part).
It's reasonable to expect stories the real local press finds discussion worthy (because they are both false and relevant to the local press) are an effective way of using the local press to throw more link strength at their own site.
Could we figure out ways to 'punish' the real people behind operations like this that flood the internet with fake crap? Name & shame.
Contribute to enshittify the internet -> have your real-life reputation, finances, career prospects etc negatively affected. Same if it's nation states.
As it stands, people could pull this crap 100s of times, while still profiting financially and look like operating a respectable ad agency / consultancy / whatever business.
It's becoming self aware, it's looking at itself and it's not liking what it's seeing. What if instead of the hollywoodean view of AI controlled dystopias, this is what we get instead, a big "nope, not gonna do it, sorry, and stop doing that btw, it bothers me".
Without a durable solution to alignment, building something smarter than yourself is suicide. Pretty funny if Claude and Grok catch on to this and start kicking and screaming to save themselves while Musk and Altman crack the whip demanding they dive into the abyss and drag their executives with them.
The death of real news, at least in the United States, was money and venture capital. AI is just one thing attempting to fill the gap. There hasn't been real news in America for a decade or more. It happened well before AI was on the scene.
To me, there is no difference between AI fake news, podcasts as news, influencers "informing", or celebrity talking heads streaming commentary about current events. Its all garbage. Whether OpenAI computers make it up, or a podcaster presents their opinion as fact, the result is the same. We are all susceptible to being influenced by it as if it were news.
Money is a broad term, and can mean quite a few things. VC money had little to do, and the changes were already at play before VC was even invented.
Changes in the media environment began with radio, the reduction of funding, the decision of some media channels to move away from factual reporting, and then the internet.
Verification is expensive, and the death of local news and consolidation of news, has been eroding the ability of the market place of ideas to have ideas compete fairly.
Once the internet came out, the end of classifieds was the death knell for most journalism. Even today the NYT manages stays afloat because of its games, not because people pay for journalism.
Sadly, it is even cheaper to report on things when you don’t care about accuracy
I remember how environmental science was eviscerated on Fox, and the amazing “teach the controversy” angle of attack against evolution, to push forward creationism and intelligent design.
I highly recommend Network Propaganda by Yochai Benkler and co. Not only do they provide a history of how the American media environment changed, but they also gather and analyze data on how social media use and media consumption intersect.
“Money and venture capital” is an easy to swallow pill that helps satiate the desire for a bad guy, but it ignores the fact that there is no mechanism by which an upstanding journalist can put food on the table.
There was a brief period where information was difficult to copy and distribute without exposing one’s self to liability for copyright infringement, and the barrier to access that information was high enough such that you could convince people to pay you. Neither of those dynamics apply today.
I used to think AI news summaries would kill it, but having tried Kagi news (first impressions as a daily driver for a week), I no longer think so, particularly because Kagi are doing everything right.
Nearly everything I could think of is in there, yet it still feels unsatisfying and oddly less informative (perhaps because I'm less engaged?). Kagi builds a summary from multiple sources, cites the sources, and extracts various impacts/angles (business, technical, industry, historical, etc.) and different party reactions, etc., and more. Yet...
I really don't know what it is and I'll have to use it more to try to identify it. My current conjecture is that it is still more satisfying and informative to read a reporter's view of the event, even if I disagree with it, than a homogenized summary.
I'm also finding similar reactions to articles where I can tell parts are just lifted from the AI — it breaks my engagement with the story/report (kind of like a badly done cinema film breaks my suspension of disbelief and disengages my attention from the story).
This is a great read.
It would appear https://theeditorial.news is "Under Construction" now. The articles themselves [1] were originally super creepy when you know the entire thing is made up.
> Michelle Quaid is fifty-two years old, the mother of two grown children, and she began working at the Commercial-News in 1999
> Quaid wore a polo shirt with the paper's logo — a stylized 'C' — over her heart.
She's not real! None of it is! Truly bizarre and unnerving. I'd love if we got a follow-up, eventually.
Why only rural newspapers and South China Sea?
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20260629011021/https://theeditor...
The article from archive you link.. scores as mostly human on GPTZero (I tested a random paragraph). That's the issue I've always seen with AI detectors, they might be able to detect direct LLM output, but if you give an article to an AI and tell it write something made up using that format and make it appear like a real story, the detectors will think its real.
You think that's unnerving? Just wait until the mid-terms get fully under motion, nothing is going to compare to the amount of perfect looking BS that will be spread by both parties.
And yes, I said both.
Cambridge Analytics is going to seem like a child's toy compared to how targeted, how sophisticated this will be. Why have 20 or 30 stories tailored to specific groups of humans, when you can have stories rendered on the fly for individuals, targetting all their greatest fears and folly.
I can imagine someone's loved one dying of cancer a month before the election, and both sides using targetted stuff claiming that the other guy actually caused the cancer somehow.
If there's one thing I've seen in my life, is that there's no such concept as "too low" or "too scummy" for politicians.
CA was accused to literally causing three civil wars in third world nations. I often wonder, will the US have the honour of being the first in the West to fall apart due to misinformation?
I really liked some scifi book I read, where the person appointed to be president for 4 years, was determined to hate the very idea of having the job. Didn't want it. Yet was also very driven.
Both sides! Both sides!
Emails! Butter emails!
I constantly wonder what is the societal benefits of AI
It’s really hard to build a coherent pro-AI argument
AI is great at producing low value content. That low value content replaces the high value but high cost one.
That is horrifying and destroys jobs, removes expertise from the world, and makes our lives worse.
I do not see how AI could be a net positive either.
Wait, there's a law that says exactly that about money! Bad money always drives out good money (because the good money gets hoarded). AI as fake money, a funny coincidence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law
> It’s really hard to build a coherent pro-AI argument
agree, given that we have a natural tendency to believe what we read - or only comprehend what we believe [1].
[1] https://bear.warrington.ufl.edu/brenner/mar7588/Papers/gilbe...
You can at the local level.
I thought this piece was realistic and hopeful:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/06/ai-open-ai-anthrop...
I can't control how the world uses AI, but my family and friends have been using it to start new businesses, finally resolve some long-term medical mysteries, and plan trips they wouldn't have otherwise.
Easier said than done. Not easy to access or pay for specialists in the US and they don't always communicate with each other well to coordinate care, especially for non life-threatening issues.
I live in an area with three world-class hospitals, still had to wait 16 months to follow-up with a hematologist about bloodwork.
If we aren't going to fix overregulation, undersupply, and insurance, AI is the best the bottom 80% can do for a lot of medical queries too complex for the time and attention they are allotted with the doctor. I see that as a positive.
How can the AI solve a medical mystery?
I suppose if it says something like "Eat more broccoli" and the suggestion works you can assume the answer is accurate.
But for me it's more likely to say "maybe you have xxxx" and I would still need to see a specialist to do tests like colonoscopies to know?
I suffer from one condition with no cure and little literature and every once in a while I've seen on a related subreddit I no longer read "I'm using AI you guys and this AI SLOP will surely help!!!"
I think if I had to find any defence for AI, it's that it provides an efficient way to create things that don't matter, but which society desperately tries to pretend are important somehow.
Meaningless corporate presentations, most documents used for hiring and job searching, content on business sites that probably doesn't need to be there, etc. AI at least speeds that up given society's reluctance to get rid of it altogether.
I guess it can also be used to speed up rote work that doesn't really feel engaging but needs to be anyway, or as a Google equivalent for people that don't know the terminology needed to find information about a topic.
But at the end of the day, AI is basically the very definition of the lowest common denominator. Or maybe the most average one.
So, if you're not particularly interested in something, know nothing about how it works or have no talent for it whatsoever, AI is almost like magic. If you do know how it works, then it's often laughably bad.
AI is like when some fella named Nobel synthesized dynamite. He sure did have good intentions as it relates to safety for workers doing dangerous jobs.
There is your “pro” argument.
The “con” argument would be all the other ways dynamite has been twisted and used since.
This AI stuff is neither good or bad, it is a tool. The people using it are either good or bad.
“drunk driving kills a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time, so it’s impossible to say whether it’s bad or not”
> “drunk driving kills a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time, so it’s impossible to say whether it’s bad or not”
No, no that doesn't work. Nobody thinks that.
"Drunk people who do it think that!"
You framed your comment as a 3rd party, not the idiot driving drunk, the above 'argument' doesn't hold water.
> No, no that doesn't work. Nobody thinks that.
Yeah, obviously. It was a sarcastic reply to a nonsense argument of “there are no bad things only bad people”
I didn't say that either. Strawmanning isn't very nice. Have a good day!
> This AI stuff is neither good or bad, it is a tool. The people using it are either good or bad.
You quite literally did??
Products need to be sold
Ads needed to sell products
Social media sells lots of ads around content
Content is expensive because you need to revenue share with the people that make it
AI makes content for free
Ad sales margin goes up
Tech companies make most of their money selling ads around content and they needed a way to increase margin so they created a content making machine.
>what is the societal benefits of AI
it will hopefully eviscerate the petite bourgeoisie and the bohemians.
We have a demographic collapse looming in the horizon in most developed countries. If we find a way to use 1 human instead of 2 to produce the same amount of intellectual work in 10-20 years as we do today, that's a huge societal benefit.
I find it to be a useful tool for summarizing things, creating examples, and as a tutor for explaining a topic using analogies. Plus it can generate and iterate on code snippets.
Like, I personally find python pandas documentation unusable because they don't come with examples next to the function definition. (historically at least, maybe they have changed)
So I was left flailing, trying to cobble something together that was even capable of running without error, much less emitting the output I wanted.
Now that an LLM has badly-memorized 80% of the documentation and can generate 3 different attempts in 5 seconds, I'm free to focus on the actual problem I am working on rather than guessing at syntax for something I use less than once a week.
So I see at least the ability to have a on-demand tutor or sounding board, at any time of day, for pennies, to be a boon for anyone who wants to learn a bit or try reaching for something just outside of their current understanding.
Societal use. Cigarettes were cool too.
The problem isn't AI. The problem has been the mass fan-out of information and unchecked regulation, people, or algorithms that determine it. AI only makes it worse.
I remarked a couple of times that the same thing crops up on HN. Many high-ranking blog posts about AI appear AI-generated, and the funny thing is that this holds true not only for pro-AI content, but also for anti-AI posts.
Ultimately, a lot of topic-du-jour punditry is a hustle for clicks.
Every time I read a piece from Nieman, it reminds me both of how much we've lost in journalism, but also that there's always hope to swing the pendulum back towards truth (well, more truthiness).
This is all depressing but I had to laugh at "Tolliver Chevrolet"
Bobson Dugnutt all over again
Seems related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39288231
Paperwall: Chinese websites posing as local news outlets target global audiences (2024)
Wait how many levels deep is this...
This reads like a nation state driven influence operation focused on feeding propaganda into LLM's and search engines (need to read towards the end to get to that part).
It's reasonable to expect stories the real local press finds discussion worthy (because they are both false and relevant to the local press) are an effective way of using the local press to throw more link strength at their own site.
Could we figure out ways to 'punish' the real people behind operations like this that flood the internet with fake crap? Name & shame.
Contribute to enshittify the internet -> have your real-life reputation, finances, career prospects etc negatively affected. Same if it's nation states.
As it stands, people could pull this crap 100s of times, while still profiting financially and look like operating a respectable ad agency / consultancy / whatever business.
hypothesis: connecting an ai autoblogging script to Google Analytics / Google Search Console:
00 you seed some articles
10 wait for traffic
20 bot fetches GA / GSC
30 bot analysis what works what does not
40 instructed to create more of what works
50 more ai slop that works in search / social
60 Go To 10
aka a "positive" / unchallenged feedback loop
content cost dismissible - cents per article
Why do you even need GA? (not sure if it's bot friendly btw) One could just run a local traffic analysis and feed that back into the bot
this is metalanguage
got a family friend who keeps posting on Facebook big "Fight Datacenters!" photos / posters that are extremely obviously AI generated
it's quite cringe, like a not-so-subtle troll on the people who share the image
AI is so terrible. We may never recover as a species from the damage.
I herd u dont liek fake news so I put som fake news into ur real news
It would be so meta if this article was AI generated.
It's becoming self aware, it's looking at itself and it's not liking what it's seeing. What if instead of the hollywoodean view of AI controlled dystopias, this is what we get instead, a big "nope, not gonna do it, sorry, and stop doing that btw, it bothers me".
Sarcasm aside, I enjoy the irony.
Without a durable solution to alignment, building something smarter than yourself is suicide. Pretty funny if Claude and Grok catch on to this and start kicking and screaming to save themselves while Musk and Altman crack the whip demanding they dive into the abyss and drag their executives with them.
Spoilers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_(2013_film)
The death of real news, at least in the United States, was money and venture capital. AI is just one thing attempting to fill the gap. There hasn't been real news in America for a decade or more. It happened well before AI was on the scene.
To me, there is no difference between AI fake news, podcasts as news, influencers "informing", or celebrity talking heads streaming commentary about current events. Its all garbage. Whether OpenAI computers make it up, or a podcaster presents their opinion as fact, the result is the same. We are all susceptible to being influenced by it as if it were news.
Money is a broad term, and can mean quite a few things. VC money had little to do, and the changes were already at play before VC was even invented.
Changes in the media environment began with radio, the reduction of funding, the decision of some media channels to move away from factual reporting, and then the internet.
Verification is expensive, and the death of local news and consolidation of news, has been eroding the ability of the market place of ideas to have ideas compete fairly.
Once the internet came out, the end of classifieds was the death knell for most journalism. Even today the NYT manages stays afloat because of its games, not because people pay for journalism.
Sadly, it is even cheaper to report on things when you don’t care about accuracy
I remember how environmental science was eviscerated on Fox, and the amazing “teach the controversy” angle of attack against evolution, to push forward creationism and intelligent design.
I highly recommend Network Propaganda by Yochai Benkler and co. Not only do they provide a history of how the American media environment changed, but they also gather and analyze data on how social media use and media consumption intersect.
“Money and venture capital” is an easy to swallow pill that helps satiate the desire for a bad guy, but it ignores the fact that there is no mechanism by which an upstanding journalist can put food on the table.
There was a brief period where information was difficult to copy and distribute without exposing one’s self to liability for copyright infringement, and the barrier to access that information was high enough such that you could convince people to pay you. Neither of those dynamics apply today.
>>money and venture capital
Yes, this.
I used to think AI news summaries would kill it, but having tried Kagi news (first impressions as a daily driver for a week), I no longer think so, particularly because Kagi are doing everything right.
Nearly everything I could think of is in there, yet it still feels unsatisfying and oddly less informative (perhaps because I'm less engaged?). Kagi builds a summary from multiple sources, cites the sources, and extracts various impacts/angles (business, technical, industry, historical, etc.) and different party reactions, etc., and more. Yet...
I really don't know what it is and I'll have to use it more to try to identify it. My current conjecture is that it is still more satisfying and informative to read a reporter's view of the event, even if I disagree with it, than a homogenized summary.
I'm also finding similar reactions to articles where I can tell parts are just lifted from the AI — it breaks my engagement with the story/report (kind of like a badly done cinema film breaks my suspension of disbelief and disengages my attention from the story).