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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
I'd suggest real news is alive and thriving, and you just have to pay for it. A trust relationship with a competent human being (or even trusted agents) via a trusted channel will always work.
"AI fake news complaining about how AI fake news is the beginning of a low-trust world" was also an option.
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.
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!
I constantly wonder what is the societal benefits of AI
It’s really hard to build a coherent pro-AI argument
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
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”
>what is the societal benefits of AI
it will hopefully eviscerate the petite bourgeoisie and the bohemians.
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.
This is all depressing but I had to laugh at "Tolliver Chevrolet"
Bobson Dugnutt all over again
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).
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.
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.
Wait how many levels deep is this...
this is metalanguage
It would be so meta if this article was AI generated.
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
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
I'd suggest real news is alive and thriving, and you just have to pay for it. A trust relationship with a competent human being (or even trusted agents) via a trusted channel will always work.
"AI fake news complaining about how AI fake news is the beginning of a low-trust world" was also an option.
I herd u dont liek fake news so I put som fake news into ur real news
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)