A few days ago, our colleagues at Next.ink announced that they had discovered and identified more than 1,000 dubious French-language news websites. Presented as real media, these sites are in fact responsible for polluting the web with articles supposedly written by journalists, when in fact they are not.
In reality, smart people are creating news websites with articles written using artificial intelligence, without mentioning it, with all the questions that this can raise. Because in addition to the fact that some of the information published on these websites is completely misleading, some of these fake media are mainly based on the plagiarism of articles published abroad and translated into French.
A rather problematic phenomenon since some of these websites end up being propelled on Google News and generate profits thanks to false, misleading information or plagiarized articles.
A Chrome and Firefox extension to identify fake news sites
Faced with the scale of the problem, our colleagues at Next.ink have developed a browser extension capable of warning you as soon as you visit one of these websites. In concrete terms, this extension, which runs in the background, includes a list of websites that have been identified as being sites generated by an AI. Each time you arrive on the domain of a site present in this list, an alert is automatically displayed. “Detection is done based on the domain name, not each page individually. A report does not necessarily mean that the article in question is generated using AI, but that it is found on this domain name." specifies Next.ink on its website.
To identify news sites that publish articles that have been generated by AI, our colleagues relied on a reading grid with specific criteria allowing to identify content generated by AI. The articles published on these websites use, for example, expressions or “patterns” typical of certain AIs. The papers are signed by journalists who do not exist, or who have “inhuman” productivity. Some articles are translated or paraphrased, and have been published on sites without legal notices and without a publication director. Some even usurp the identity of media (which no longer exist) by using the expired domain name to end up in Google News and Discover.
Ironically, Alert on GenAI sites, by Next.ink, that’s the name of this extension, was partly developed thanks to an AI (Claude.ai) and a developer from moji. This extension is offered for free and is available on Firefox and Google Chrome. Note that the Chrome version should work with all Chromium-based browsers.
Source: Next.ink
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