A longtime San Francisco hyper-local news site is using generative AI for the vast majority of its recent, “originally reported” stories — without clear disclosures to the extent of its use.
A substantial chunk of content on Hoodline’s website in recent months — save for a handful of stories reported and written by a few longtime (human) contributors — appears to be produced by a synthetic text generator.
“This is straight-up AI spam,” Max Spero, the CEO of AI content detection firm Pangram Labs, told Gazetteer SF after reviewing a selection of stories published on Hoodline in March. “It is very obvious.”
Additionally, these stories are bylined by a rotating cast of five authors, most, if not all, of whose bylines appear to be AI-generated fabrications. Some of these writers have been published on the site since at least May 2023.
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