In his spare time, Tony Eastin enjoys dabbling in the stock market. One day last year, he decided to research a pharmaceutical company that seemed like a good investment. To his surprise, one of the top search results on Google’s news tab was from the Clayton County Register, a newspaper in northeastern Iowa. However, the article was poorly written and lacked any useful information. Eastin found it strange that a local newspaper would publish low-quality finance posts unrelated to their area. This sparked his curiosity.
With a background in psychological warfare campaigns in the US Air Force and experience investigating online nastiness at Meta, Eastin was intrigued by the mystery. He reached out to his friend Sandeep Abraham, a former Meta colleague with a background in intelligence, and together they began digging deeper.
Their investigation revealed a network of websites using generative AI to create clickbait content. These sites exploit the reputations of established media outlets and brands to deceive audiences and advertisers. By squatting on URLs of reputable organizations, they profit from confusion and misinformation. The site Eastin encountered no longer belonged to the legitimate newspaper it claimed to be affiliated with.
Eastin and Abraham believe that this network, created for profit, could be exploited by more nefarious actors to spread misinformation and propaganda through search results. They see this as a significant threat and aim to raise awareness through their findings. They have released a report on their discoveries and plan to continue investigating AI clickbait, hoping to alert the public and lawmakers to the issue.
Faked News
The Clayton County Register, originally founded in 1926 and covering Ekader, Iowa, and Clayton County, is now a financial news content mill operating under its former web address. The site publishes AI-generated articles on stock prices and other financial topics, accompanied by AI-generated images.
According to Ben Colman, CEO of deepfake detection startup Reality Defender, the articles and images on the site are generated by AI using diffusion models. Some articles even mention that the content was auto-generated by a company called Automated Insights.
