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Polymarket’s AI is Feeding Users Fabricated Information

Columbia Journalism Review · Tory Lysik · last updated

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.

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