When the Pink-Slime Researchers Become the Pink Slime
We love to hear when journalists engage with our research, so in October, we set up an LLM agent to sort through Google Alerts for Tow Center’s work and notify us when our research is cited in news. The bot began to diligently filter alerts for new mentions of the Tow Center and sent us Slack notifications with references to our work. We celebrated the small wins.
But not even a week in, Elon Musk launched Grokipedia—his own AI-generated misinformation-peddling version of Wikipedia—and we began receiving notifications about sites we had never heard of quoting our director, Professor Emily Bell, talking about the launch.
Related Knowledge Center: Artificial intelligence
On top of a failing business model, newsrooms must navigate the powerful — and not fully reliable — new capabilities of artificial intelligence and the deployment of large language models.
State of the business model | Copyright and intellectual property
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