GoKawiilSign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Email address Sign Up Thank you!
On Tuesday evening, we published an original interview with a researcher who had recently coauthored an intriguing study about the effects of AI on users’ cognition.
A news site called National Today quickly sprang into action: by ten o’clock that night, it had published a piece that was obviously a reworded version of our story, including a direct quote from the interview we’d conducted. But instead of crediting us as the source of the information, as would be conventional, National Today made no mention of Futurism, and didn’t even link to our article. Instead, it presented the reporting as if it were the original source.
In other words, the National Today piece — which bears no byline — is blatant plagiarism. And this isn’t the first time this has happened.
Last week, for example, National Today ran a story about a controversial GLP-1 marketer called Medvi. It was obvious that National Today ripped us off, because it’d again stolen a quote we’d obtained from an expert while reporting, and had again failed to mention us or link to our work. Before that, it published a dupe of a Futurism blog about a realtor who accidentally posted a real estate listing that included an AI-generated demon crawling out of a mirror, also without giving us any credit.
We’re not the only target. Once we started looking into National Today, we realized that it’s doing the same thing to countless other publications, ranging from top newspapers to local newsrooms across the country: stealing their original reporting and using it to publish a torrent of what appear to clearly be AI-generated articles, complete with bizarre errors and hallucinations. The scope is immense. We tried to count how many it published in a single day, but lost count around 300.
The site’s theft is blatant. In a single article it published this week about writer and actress Lena Dunham, National Today plagiarized direct quotes from three separate interviews Dunham gave to prominent outlets — The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and The Guardian — without attributing any of them.
In a particularly ghoulish example, last week National Today stole the work of Mellie Valencia, a reporter at the East Texas broadcaster KTRE who had reported out a heartbreaking story about a local mother whose 10-year-old daughter tragically passed away from a rare brain tumor in March. Despite the deeply sensitive nature of the reporting, National Today still spat out a plagiarized copy.
“This is very upsetting to see,” Valencia told Futurism, adding that a “lot of leg work was put into the story and real human connections were made with the family — and to see it pulled and replicated… is sad.”
“My hope is that since KTRE is one of the only stations covering this area,” Valencia continued, “people will head to our website instead of other websites to get the most up to date information.”
... continue reading