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Taylor Lorenz

“We found the company's phony authors and their work everywhere from celebrity gossip outlets like Hollywood Life and Us Weekly to venerable newspapers like the Los Angeles Times.” futurism.com/advon-ai-content

8 May at 15:32 | Open on mastodon.social
11 comments
Krupo

@taylorlorenz so skeevy

"Behind the scenes, AdVon responded to our reporting with a fusillade of denials and legal threats. At one point, its attorneys gave us seven days to issue a retraction on our Sports Illustrated story to avoid "protracted litigation" — but after the deadline came and went, no legal action materialized."

8 May at 15:37 | Open on infosec.exchange
Krupo

@taylorlorenz oh my goodness it gets worse

"Despite those ties, we continued investigating AdVon, and experienced zero interference from anyone at Recurrent. That said, AdVon's cofounder responded to questions about this story by pointedly informing us of his business and personal connections with Recurrent's CEO and the executive chairman of Recurrent's board, in what felt like an effort to hamper our reporting by implying access to a corridor of power over our jobs. As you're about to read: didn't work"

8 May at 15:40 | Open on infosec.exchange
Krupo

@taylorlorenz good luck in court AdVon

"As evidence, one of AdVon's attorneys provided screenshots of what he said were the Google Docs edit histories of several AdVon articles.

In theory, these edit histories could be compelling evidence against the notion that the articles were generated using AI. If they showed drafts being typed out over a reasonable period of time, it'd make a strong case that a human writer had written them instead of pasting in an entire piece generated by AI.

But that's not what the screenshots show. For example, one of the edit histories is for a Sports Illustrated review of various volleyballs. The article is about 2,200 words long, but the edit history shows its author producing the whole draft in just five minutes, between 5:04 am and 5:09 am on the same morning.

Banging out 2,200 words in five minutes would require a typing speed of 440 words per minute, which is substantially faster than the current world record for speed typing, which stands at just 300 words per minute"

@taylorlorenz good luck in court AdVon

"As evidence, one of AdVon's attorneys provided screenshots of what he said were the Google Docs edit histories of several AdVon articles.

In theory, these edit histories could be compelling evidence against the notion that the articles were generated using AI. If they showed drafts being typed out over a reasonable period of time, it'd make a strong case that a human writer had written them instead of pasting in an entire piece generated by AI.

8 May at 15:49 | Open on infosec.exchange
Krupo

I love a solid dunking. That Futurism article is relentless at running up the scoreboard.

Required reading.

8 May at 15:50 | Open on infosec.exchange
Krupo

They reached the "stop it they're dead already" point.

"Asked how a human writer could have created the articles so quickly, AdVon's attorney proffered a new suggestion: they had been copied and pasted from somewhere else, writing that "its [sic] common practice for a writer to draft an article in a particular word processor (MS Word, WordPerfect) and import (cut and paste) the text into another word processor (such as Google Docs) or CMS."

Of course, it's also possible to generate an article using AI and then paste it into Google Docs.

Asked whether it could provide the edit histories to the original drafts of the articles, AdVon didn't reply."

They reached the "stop it they're dead already" point.

"Asked how a human writer could have created the articles so quickly, AdVon's attorney proffered a new suggestion: they had been copied and pasted from somewhere else, writing that "its [sic] common practice for a writer to draft an article in a particular word processor (MS Word, WordPerfect) and import (cut and paste) the text into another word processor (such as Google Docs) or CMS."

8 May at 15:51 | Open on infosec.exchange
DirtWood
Eric Carroll
Seth 🎙️:jawn_sg:

@taylorlorenz Gross but sad that it's happening.

8 May at 17:56 | Open on s3th.me
Toni Aittoniemi

@taylorlorenz The garbage machine is just getting started..

8 May at 18:17 | Open on mastodon.green
64 Islands Airship Co-op

@taylorlorenz @kcarruthers so this will be what finally kills off commercial journalism, companies devaluing writers to the point where they are willing to publish mush written by robots instead

8 May at 19:52 | Open on cloudisland.nz
bitcrush.io

@taylorlorenz
This explains so much and also totally sucks to be aware of. In any case, thanks for sharing it.

8 May at 21:07 | Open on oldbytes.space
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