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by ImAnAmateur 1011 days ago
The archived MSN article in question: https://archive.ph/jKJHn
2 comments

This isn't AI generated, it's synonym-spun.

It's an old spammer tactic, to take a real article from somewhere else and randomly replace words with (things they hope are) synonyms. "Dead" becomes "Useless", "played" becomes "performed", "passed" becomes "handed", "men's" becomes "males's" etc. It doesn't matter if it turns into garbage, as long as web spiders don't spot it and see it as original content. It's written to fool robots, not people.

I guess it could be that a language model spat out a synonym-spun article out of whole cloth. They are very familiar with the genre, probably because there's a lot of it in their training data.

But it could also be a hand-written article that got passed through a synonym spinner for some reason.

potato potato
You can do this sort of synonym spinning with a 5 min python script and no imported libraries. No language model needed. It's silly to call that AI.

This is good old-fashioned plagiarism, with a cheap twenty year old trick to fool plagiarism detectors.

Stop saying it that way.
The article quality is extremely low, they are skimping even on the models.
The unrelated New York Post article on that page is nearly as bad.

Are there different grades of syndicated articles now or something?

Edit: The Futurism article points out MSN fired all their editorial staff a few years ago. It’s not surprising people just shovel garbage into their feed, though I thought the New York Post had higher standards. (I never thought I’d read, let alone write, that sentence…)