AI-generated news sites repurpose content from Canadian media outlets

Analysis

A website using artificial intelligence personas to rewrite stories from legitimate Canadian news outlets appears to have been delisted from Google search results.

The site, We News, employs fake journalists like "Geneviève Tremblay" and editor-in-chief "Gordon Halloway" to repurpose content from sources including CBC, CTV, Global, CityNews, the Montreal Gazette and The Canadian Press.

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"I think industrial-scale AI slop (sites) like this one run the risk of degrading the trust in the news," said Jon Gillham, CEO of the AI detection company Originality.ai.

His company analyzed just over 200 articles by "Geneviève Tremblay" and identified them as AI-generated.

Deception and detection

The phenomenon of AI personas in news is not limited to openly automated sites.

In late September, Canadian news outlets pulled work attributed to "Daniel Robson" after being told he appeared not to be a real person.

Policy Options editor-in-chief Les Perreaux was the first to sound the alarm in Canada after an editor at Türkiye Today contacted him to vouch for Robson.

"The key moment where my heart sank was when the Turkish journalist told me that Daniel Robson refused to do a video call," Perreaux said in an interview.

He reviewed the correspondence and spotted signs of AI product, but said the bigger issue was the attempt to deceive.

"AI is definitely part of the story, but it's a smaller part than the deception part where there was a human behind this, pretending to be someone he’s not, or at least refusing to be who he really is," he said.

Türkiye Today reported the purpose of the Robson persona seems to be to attack Moroccan dissidents.

Monetization and regulation

Ahmed Al-Rawi, a professor of news, social media and public communication at Simon Fraser University, said sites with fake AI journalists are trying to monetize content.

"A lot of players, whether they are bad players or just profiteers, people who are really trying to get money, are exploiting the hard work of real journalists in order to repackage news content," he said.

He said social media platforms "should also be blamed for enhancing the popularity of these fake websites."

Western University assistant professor of journalism Chris Arsenault said it is difficult to regulate these websites.

"You can get a free or very cheap AI model to pump out this kind of nonsense, and you can always find somebody to host it," he said. "So it's a very hard thing to legislate around or to respond to in terms of effective policy."

Paul Deegan, president of the publishers group News Media Canada, said while news content is covered by copyright, it is very difficult for publishers to sue.

"It's expensive, it takes a long time, whether or not they are in fact in Canada," he said.

We News says it is based in Hong Kong.

News Media Canada is calling on the federal government to state publicly that it does not intend to introduce a broad exception to copyright law for text and data mining.

Government and platform response

AI Minister Evan Solomon’s office said in a media statement that "Canadians deserve to know when the information they consume has been generated or altered by AI."

"Generative AI can be a useful and powerful tool, but Canadians should not be deceived by content that impersonates journalists or conceals how it was created," the statement said.

The office pointed to a recently-concluded consultation on AI transparency and said it recognizes "the concerns raised by journalists and other creators about consent, compensation, attribution and transparency when their work is used to train AI systems."

Google did not directly answer questions about whether it has delisted We News from its search results.

A spokesperson said in a statement the company’s policies for search and Google News "prohibit producing low-value content at scale to game our ranking systems."

"While we generally don’t comment on individual sites, we act on policy violations to keep 99 per cent of search visits spam-free," the spokesperson added.

Deegan said it is in Google’s interest to "make sure that when people go to Google for information that they're getting accurate information … For them to de-rank and remove these sites that are clearly involved in theft makes sense."

The Canadian Press attempted to reach a human behind We News, but the contact email address listed on the site bounced back.

A similar U.S. operation, Brown Brothers Media, which Futurism reported bought legitimate news sites and flooded them with AI content, appears to have stopped publishing and was delisted or downranked by Google.

Arsenault said there may be no silver bullet to solve the problem, but pointed to one antidote: old-fashioned reporting.

He noted the "Daniel Robson" case came to light because "of an old-school editor in Turkey who had the temerity and good sense to just, God forbid, pick up a telephone and do some basic journalism, just do some due diligence on a would-be contributor."

With files from The Canadian Press, Global News and Narcity