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by FAKEDETECTOR 2321 days ago
Question about your product: besides "gaming the system with creating fake or duplicated + slightly modified content" what is the value of this?

Question about you: did you ever consider using your skills to do something that will help humanity to solve actual problems we are facing?

Proposal: let this grow as a honeypot and publish a list of your customers after some while, so we can spot the "quality journalists" - that will be fun!

TODO for everybody: integrate fake news detector from sites like this into ublock-origin. Make them invisible.

1 comments

In a world where disinformation and clickbait journalism is prevalent, we want to allow content creators to have that same rapid pace (pace of how quickly they make content) but make sure it’s factual/credible and demonstrates value.

Here's how we do this: Suppose a journalist as X amount of time to create an article (we're talking about lower-tier/repetitive journalism, which consists of a majority of journalism) They have two options:

1. Write some relatively bogus article to drive clicks

2. We write a majority of their article within seconds and they spend the X amount of time editing our article/regenerating it. We're planning on implementing fact-checking algos in end so after they're done editing, we ensure the content is legit.

We don't want to replace journalism. We just want to automate lower tier journalism (clickbait, repetitive sports articles) and hope they utilize their time ensuring the content is substantive to their audience.

You help people pollute the web. Got it.

> (we're talking about lower-tier/repetitive journalism, which consists of a majority of journalism)

The majority of content farms maybe. The majority of journalism is interviews, local events, editorial pieces, analysis, obituaries, event listings, etc. I work with dozens of news organizations and you do not seem to fully understand how a legitimate news business is run. Your tech may be interesting but in my opinion your tool is more harmful to journalism than it is helpful.

Here's how I'm going to use your technology:

I am going to resell it to small businesses so that they can publish a neverending stream of nonsense keyword-laden articles to improve their SEO. Hotels, restaurants, medical practices. Anyone with cash really.

That's what this is going to be used for.

That only holds up if X remains constant. Option #1 is already considered acceptable by these low-quality sites, so why wouldn't they instead choose:

3. Automatically write a relatively bogus article to drive clicks.

For a business model that already works for Option 1, Option 3 is the same thing with less overhead.

I do see how this can greatly enable propaganda / fake-news creation however. Time spent editing an article doesn't inherently mean time spent making it more accurate or reality-based; it can just as easily mean time spent twisting words to imply a propaganda goal. This may not be your goal, but it's an inevitable consequence of the technology.

Makes a lot of sense, I do hope you succeed.

Also, I work in the academia, something like this would be very helpful also in that area.

Thanks for the support! You can always email us at bigbird@bigbird.dev if you'd like to know more.