Polymarket’s AI is Feeding Users Fabricated Information
The prediction market fancies itself a “global truth machine” and a boon to journalism. Tow finds a very different reality.
Polymarket, a betting website where users can place wagers on current events, publishes AI-generated news timelines on its website that are saturated with hallucinations ranging from misrepresentations and misattribution of news to outright fabricated references to nonexistent news stories, a Tow Center for Digital Journalism analysis finds.
The CEO of the site has called Polymarket “the global truth machine” and “News 2.0.” The site has struck up a partnership with Dow Jones that pipes its market probabilities into the Wall Street Journal and Barron’s. Polymarket positions itself as a boon to journalism and a source of information rather than just a place to gamble, as my colleague Klaudia Jaźwińska pointed out in April, but its misrepresentations of legitimate news content undermine these claims.
Related Knowledge Center: Prediction markets
Platforms are offering a way for users trade positions — place bets — on a wide range of possible events, and newsrooms are starting to incorporate the data.
As the business rapidly grows, critics and opponents are pushing back. Numerous states have argued that the markets are gambling, and sports gambling in particular is regulated by the state. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, now led by a Trump appointee, disagrees — as did a federal district court judge in a suit involving New Jersey.
Critics see some of the markets as, particularly in the case of military actions, indefensible, and note as well that some large, well-timed bets — “event contracts” — suggest an abuse of insider knowledge of federal actions.
Related Knowledge Center: Information integrity
In an increasingly fractured media landscape, truth has been a casualty in the public discussion. Coverage has been warped by the business needs of struggling news organizations, and a significant segment of the public relies on bad-faith outlets that are little more than propagandists. While fact-checking has become routine, some organizations are exploring other ways to combat the trends. And misinformation spewed by AI-driven chatbots has become more of a feature than simply a bug.
Fact-checking and its detractors