A network of seemingly AI-generated local news websites is confusing UK and US place names in its apparently robot-written reports.
Press Gazette has identified six examples across a group of 15 UK regional titles owned by Times Intelligence Media Group.
The 15 sites include four in London, two in Wales, two in Scotland and one in each of the following: Birmingham, Oxford, Bristol, Liverpool, Leeds, Cambridge and Manchester.
[Read more: London news website publishes misleading ‘AI-generated fiction’]
One place-name howler appeared on London News North, which published a story about a school becoming apartments for seniors in Enfield. However, the story appeared to have been lifted from Connecticut-based daily newspaper Greenwich Time about its US town of Enfield, rather than the north London borough of the same name.
Other examples identified include:
— Standard Liverpool detailed the renewal of a permit for a mill in Utah, mixing up the company’s name Anfield Energy with the area called Anfield in Liverpool. This was linked back to Mining.com in the copy.
— Manchester Mirror reported a story about an investment in a veterinary lab in Bolton, Massachusetts, instead of Bolton in Manchester. This was linked back to Montco.today.
— Tribune Cambridge reported on folk singer Allison Lupton’s latest release – except that Lupton is based in Canada and the story cites its source as Cambridge Today, a publisher based in Cambridge Ontario. Tribune Cambridge published the story within two hours Cambridge Today.
— Oxford Daily shared a story on the death of a doctor from Barton, Connecticut and paramedic graduates from Barton Community College, linking back to legacy.com and citing Barton Community College respectively.
The geographical blunders raise concerns about human oversight and editing, and indicate that the stories may automatically pushed out.
According to AI-detection tool for editors Made by Humans (developed by Flip-Pay and Press Gazette) all the place name mix-up articles appear to be mainly written by AI.
Times Intelligence Media Group says in its website terms and conditions that all material is reviewed and approved before publication.
“Some content on this website may be produced with the assistance of AI tools; however, all material is reviewed and approved by professional editors or journalists before publication,” it says.
“We do not routinely monitor or edit user-generated content, including comments, blogs, or forum posts, but we may remove material or take action if it violates the law, these Terms, or general standards of decency.”
Press Gazette has previously found that several stories on London News North appear to have accidentally left in AI prompts or parts of an AI reply. Multiple stories have “Inverted Pyramid Structure” or “Inverted Pyramid News Structure” as subheadings, reference names and groups that do not exist and include US spelling.
All bylines for the 15 sites appear to be under “News Desk”.
A right of reply was sent to both a generic (non-named) email address for North London News, which bounced back, and Times Intelligence, which Press Gazette has not heard back from at time of writing.
The group’s Linkedin page states that it has two to ten employees, it does not have any real Linkedin members associated with it as would usually be the case.
James Cracknell, editor-in-chief at Social Spider CIC – which publishes the Waltham Forest Echo, Haringey Community Press, Enfield Dispatch and Barnet Post – told Press Gazette the North London News site is “obviously very heavily reliant on AI”.
“Previously what we were concerned about was that it was just rehashing stories that we published on our websites because we cover a lot of the same boroughs that this website covers,” he said.
“Then they were doing this thing where somehow the AI system was almost muddling up what we’d reported and then adding in fake names and fake quotes and turning what would have been an accurate story into an inaccurate one.”
Cracknell described the confusion between US and UK local news as “completely insane”.
Having spotted the Enfield story, he said this “either proves that there are no humans checking it, or the humans that are checking it are completely clueless, because it’s not difficult to see that this story is about Enfield in Connecticut, not Enfield, North London”.
“We don’t know who’s behind [the sites],” he added. “It’s very mysterious, but whoever is behind it, they are either not doing those checks, or they are just complete morons.”
Possible malware link on site
Press Gazette also found a button on the site that claimed to convert articles into pdfs for readers, taking them to pdf-nexus.com.
A security assessment published by MalwareTips on 13 October gave the domain a score of 15 out of 100, classifying it as dangerous.
The report added: “Security vendors have identified as spyware with process injection and data theft capabilities.”
After entering this link into ChatGPT, the chatbot said: “Malware warning on the link north London news website. Do not download anything from this website.”
Times Intelligence Media Group’s advertising terms state the group reserves “the right to reject, amend, suspend, or remove advertising at any stage” if it poses legal or technical risk, breaches applicable laws and regulations or is misleading or unethical.
It added: “Advertisers remain solely responsible for the content of their advertisements and any linked landing pages.”
The sites appear attract between 5,000 and 10,000 visits per month each, according to Similarweb.
Times Intelligence Group offers press release distribution services and paid content posting. The sites also appear to be funded by programmatic advertising.
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