This is a post about how the internet is getting worse. It’s about so-called ‘AI’, chatbots and plagiarism, and how they are churning out utterly useless rubbish for the sole purpose of getting your eyes onto their ads and their cookies onto your device.
Today it emerged that a local authority in the middle of Ireland was cheated out of half a million euros. Here is a report from the Irish Independent, published earlier today, reporting on the revelations of fraud.
I saw the Irish Independent article less than an hour after it was published. Less than an hour later, a website called ‘BNN, The People’s Network’ had an article up on the same topic. I will not link to this article, because if you go there you will have to spend 3-5 minutes manually opting out of various ‘legitimate interest’ cookie options.
The sub-heading invites us to ‘Explore the high-stakes drama at Westmeath County Council.’ The article begins: ‘In the heart of Ireland, a story unfolds that reads more like a thriller novel than a report from the municipal offices.’
But what follows is neither thrilling nor dramatic. We don’t explore or discover anything. There is no story. It is the exact same items of information that are in the Irish Independent article, but strewn around and hidden in ridiculous overwritten paragraphs:
‘The digital age brings with it incredible opportunities, but also unfathomable risks. The road to recovery for Westmeath County Council will be paved with lessons learned the hard way. It’s a testament to the resilience of the community and the individuals determined to restore what was lost […] While the investigation continues, and the council rebuilds, the story […] underscores the importance of vigilance, transparency, and the unbreakable spirit of community in the face of adversity.’
You’d think Westmeath had been struck by a terrorist or a decent-sized meteor.
There is nothing in the ‘People’s Network’ article that is not in the Independent article – except for one thing (or, the same thing repeated again and again, because everything is said at least three times): references to cybersecurity. No public statement has made any reference to cyber crime, or indicated that this was digital fraud.
At first I thought this was written by a human, content-mill crap, a step above plagiarism. But pretty soon I figured it was a chatbot.
How could I tell it was a bot?
1: Plagiarism. It was obvious to me because I’d just read the Indo article: there was nothing new here. Someone took the Indo article and fed it into a programme, which spat out this.
2: No sense of proportion. This thing was composed by an entity that has no inkling of what Westmeath is or what fraud is or what a euro is. It’s a trained predictive typing trick that arranges words in a plausible order. ‘The Chief Executive of Westmeath County Council is poised to make an official statement, a move that many await with bated breath.’ I live in Westmeath, and no, my breath is not bated.
3: Good grammar, terrible prose. I like to believe that a human, even the worst hack, would get nauseous writing such a cascade of clichés (‘reads more like a thriller’…’at the center of a high-stakes drama’…’a cornerstone of its relationship’…’this incident is a wake-up call’…’it serves as a poignant reminder’… ‘it’s a stark reminder of’…’underscores the importance of’…’underscores the critical need for’… A writer who takes some else’s writing and, within two hours, has it cannibalised and regurgitated, might be expected to make some mistakes on the spelling and grammar. If this writer, in addition, writes not in words but in stock phrases, they are likely to have problems with word order and sentence construction. But even that bad human writer would be more interesting. They would not be determined to say that everything is a reminder, a wake-up call or an underscore. They would get bored with the constant resort to bland linking phrases.
4: Repetition and needless elaboration. Most of the word count of the article is totally unnecessary. For example, the chatbot tells us the same thing four times: ‘[1] The details of this fraud have been kept under wraps, not out of secrecy, but to protect the integrity of the ongoing investigation. [2] Elected members of the council, though informed, have remained tight-lipped, respecting the delicate nature of the situation. [3] The Mayor of Athlone-Moate Municipal District, when approached for comment, respectfully declined, citing the active probe into the matter. […] [4] As the Gardaí delve deeper into the investigation, there’s a palpable tension between wanting to know more and the need to maintain a veil of confidentiality for the sake of justice.’
5: Obvious mistakes. The bot somehow got the wrong end of the stick. For some reason it thought this was a story about cyber crime.
6: Blandness. The story is scattered with phrases like ‘a breach of trust’ and words like ‘shockwaves’ that suggest the author is pretty excited, and that you should be too. But there is no criticism of anyone. ‘The council’s response, swift and thorough, reflects a commitment to accountability and a resolve to strengthen its defenses against future threats.’ A human would either stick to the facts (the Indo reporter presents all the information concisely) or present an opinion. This chatbot gives the impression that it has an opinion, but it’s the most boring opinion you could possibly imagine: the moral of the story is ‘fraud is bad.’ There is no meaning behind this. No feelings or ideas animate these words.
This story of content mills and chatbots is as a stark reminder of, serves as a poignant reminder of, underscores the importance of, and is a wake-up call about the attention economy and how the profit motive is spreading rot throughout the internet. I wouldn’t be writing this if it wasn’t actually kind of fun to play spot the bot. But the article you have just read (which, I hope you agree, reads more like a thriller than a blog post) will age poorly, because I predict that soon most of us will be dismally accustomed to chatbot-generated meaningless content, to having to navigate this crap in order to use the internet.
The 1919 Review 