‘AI’ Exposes Google News Quality Control Issues, Making Our Clickbait, Plagiarism, And Propaganda Problem Worse
from the broken-signal-to-noise-ratio dept
Journalists have long used Google News to track news cycles. But for years users have documented a steady decline in product quality parallel to similar complaints about the quality of Google’s broader search technology. Many stories and outlets are often no longer indexed, low quality clickbait and garbage are everywhere, and customization seems broken as Google shifted its priorities elsewhere.
Now the broader problem with Google News quality control seems to have gotten worse with the rise of “generative AI” (half baked language learning models). AI-crafted clickbait, garbage, and plagiarized articles are now dominating the Google News feed, reducing the already shaky service’s utility even further:
“Google News is boosting sites that rip-off other outlets by using AI to rapidly churn out content, 404 Media has found. Google told 404 Media that although it tries to address spam on Google News, the company ultimately does not focus on whether a news article was written by an AI or a human, opening the way for more AI-generated content making its way onto Google News.”
As we’ve seen in the broader field of content moderation, moderating these massive systems at scale is no easy feat. Compounded by the fact that companies like Google (which feebly justified more layoffs last week despite sitting on mountains of cash) would much rather be spending time and resources on things that make them more money, instead of ensuring that existing programs and systems actually work as advertised.
But the impact of Google’s cheap laziness is multi-fold. One, sloppy moderation of Google News only helps contribute to an increasingly lopsided signal to noise ratio as a dwindling number of under-funded actual journalists try to out-compete automated bullshit and well-funded propaganda mills across a broken infotainment and engagement economy. It’s already not a fair fight, and when a company like Google fails to invest in functional quality control, it actively makes the problem worse.
For example, many of automated clickbait plagiarism mills are getting the attention and funding that should be going to real journalism operating on shoestring budgets, as the gents at 404 Media (whose quality work ironically isn’t even making it to the Google News feed) explore in detail. For its part, Google reps had this to say:
“Our focus when ranking content is on the quality of the content, rather than how it was produced. Automatically-generated content produced primarily for ranking purposes is considered spam, and we take action as appropriate under our policies.”
Except they’re clearly not doing a good job at any part of that. And they’re not doing a good job at that because the financial incentives of the engagement economy are broadly perverse; aligned toward cranking out as much bullshit as possible to maximize impressions and end user engagement at scale, and against spending the money and time to ensure quality control at that same scale.
It’s not entirely unlike problems we saw when AT&T would actively support (or turn a blind eye to) scammers and crammers on its telecom networks. AT&T made money from the volume of traffic regardless of whether the traffic was harmful, muting any financial incentive to do anything about it.
This isn’t exclusively an AI problem (LLMs could be used to improve quality control). And it certainly isn’t exclusively a Google problem. But it sure would be nice if Google took a more responsible lead on the issue before what’s left of U.S. journalism drowns in a sea of automated garbage and engagement bait.
Filed Under: ai, content moderation, google news, journalism, language learning models, media, news, plagiarism, reporting, spam
Companies: google
Comments on “‘AI’ Exposes Google News Quality Control Issues, Making Our Clickbait, Plagiarism, And Propaganda Problem Worse”
Link tax???
Did I miss something?
Does this mean that places (Canada?) that require a link tax to news will end up potentially paying that tax to someone (something) that is not the originator of that news story?
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Sorry, ACe, but you did miss something. “Tax” does not appear in the blog post.
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They did not claim that “tax” appeared in the post body. They are sysnthesing a question by being aware of more things than the thing they just read.
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If so, that’s yet another argument against link taxes.
As far as I can tell, 404 Media is indeed being indexed/crawled by Google News. At the very least, a “site:” search within Google News appears to work just fine.
That said, I think that the functionality of Google News was better in the past; some of the updates over the years have indeed lessened my usual experience. Plus, I remember when MSN and Yahoo! had decent news-specific searches.
Well, Google business has always been to serve advertising. The more ads they print on screen, the less they have to spend on others projects.
Journalists should use RSS or otherwise customizable aggregators.
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Also, they should learn to use bookmarks, so they can choose where to get their news, and avoid typos taking them to a squatter site.
Re: Re: full circle
And so we go full circle back to the beginning of the WWW in the early 1990s:
1. one would maintain one’s own home page with a list of interesting bookmarks
2. then we found the indexing sites that organised things better, often hierarchically
3. then someone invented Yahoo! and Alta Vista that provided some curation and searchability within their indexes
4. Google arrived and we didn’t need Yahoo! or Alta Vista
Time to go back to step 1, except our browsers can store our book marks on their servers such that we can share them between machines…
Side note: how long before Google starts to enshittify our bookmark bars with ads?
It’s just like the old smart client server pendulum.
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Would Firefox let them. Also when I d need a search, Firefox allows me to select which search engine to use after I start typing, and to try a different one with the same query.
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What?
Why would a browser disallow certain URLs?
Just go to whatever search website and enter the terms.
I need more coffee.
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I’ve already gone that route. Google News has too many aggregators/reposters (whether they use AI or just scrape content doesn’t matter), paywalled sites and just plain click-bait farms. I’ve always had a bookmarks folder full of non-news sites that actually originate the stories the news sites report on, but I’ve started another folder for reliable news sites.
Tough to be #1
But, it is easier being a creep, and making more cash.
ATT bought Cingular because they had the initial iPhone exclusively (time gated, don’t recall how long)
A phone gets stolen, the “new” user only has one place to use it. So they created an account with ATT and did just that. Serial #, Model #, and user ID were all on the phone. ATT just allowed the thief to use the stolen phone.
Now, Google is doing some major crap. Check into their ads. They are serving ads on some really bad sites. But, they get paid, share the proceeds with bad actors, and have been fighting off advertisers that want refunds.
Google, they got their quality on full time suck.
i wasn’t aware anyone used Google News. i mean, obviously someone must …
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I happen to use it, actually. Sometimes, the service catches things I would otherwise miss. There are a lot of garbage sites on there, though. I don’t use it exclusively by any means. I use numerous different methods of finding out about things and Google News happens to be one of them. I just grew to ignore certain sources (namely right wing troll sites which I personally found to be the biggest problem on there, but my searches are quite specific, so others experience may be different).
So “AI” is basically being used as Article Spinning 2.0? Though judging by the quality it looks Article Spinning 1.0 (“Star Wars fans” becomes “war of stars fans” etc.)