Many times, generative AI inserts this phrase – “As an AI language model….” – to explain that it cannot have an opinion or conduct research, etc.

Incredibly, many books and published research papers have included this phrase – because their authors are using AI to write their papers and the quote was generated by the AI.

You can see many examples by searching for that phrase on Twitter.

We are now inundated by fake content. For more months I have been tracking online content mills. Some use real human authors, often overseas (even Americans living overseas) to crank out fluffy news articles. Others use real human authors but with stolen profile photos and fake bios. And still others are purely written by generative AI.

The Microsoft Start page purports to source its “news” from over 1,000 sources. Most of which are content mills. I will have more to say about that in the future.

Websites and apps like Newsbreak are basically content mills with low quality information. Yet the Newsbreak app is now said to be the #3 most used “news” source in the app world. But much of it is garbage. From the reviews on Google Play, they insert ads every paragraph – and the content is often not very good. It is also unclear if some of their content is purchased or stolen – I see content from our local TV news station on their web site but no indication it has been licensed. We do not know.

The business model is to incorporate algorithm generated advertising placement – think Google Ads, Facebook ads. No sales department is needed for these content mills. In fact, in some cases, no content creators are needed either – everything is machine generated with the goal of entrapping bored online web surfers amusing themselves by reading online content.

Stolen Content in E-Books

I bought several e-book cookbooks from Amazon. I was able to track each of the sampled recipes to stolen from web sites – usually converting metric to English measurements. Other than that, they were plagiarized. Each of these cookbooks had a brief author bio – and every one of the author photos I checked was a stock photo. All of the photos of the food items were stock photos purchased from a stock photo agency in China.

The conclusion is that much if not most of what we are fed on the Internet now – no matter how official looking – is fake content.

The primary goal is selling eyeballs to advertisers (Newsbreak as an example) or selling stolen content directly (the e-book cookbooks I found).

How I Discovered This

Starting months ago, I began occasionally cross checking author names appearing on news articles. I was curious about their backgrounds and what led them to their current position.

I quickly ran across suspicious backgrounds – in many cases, the author’s brief bio says they have a Masters degree in Creative Writing (or other subject), may be says they used to work for a well known news outlet – and now work as a freelance writer. Yet, they do not exist on the Internet! There name appears no where else – and surely, if you are selling your services as a freelancer you need to have an online presence for marketing purposes.

Some have LinkedIn pages – with impressive backgrounds – but they make their living writing fluffy content mill garbage and paid $60 per article? Really? Several have a set of 3-5 references on their LinkedIn page – and 100% of them turn out to be similar “freelance writers” writing content for the same content mills. In other words, they are fictional creations – the profile bio photos were probably stolen from social media pages.

Microsoft Start Garbage Content

Next, I began noticing crappy and dumb stories inserted into the Microsoft Start page news feed, from web sites with unusual names. Check out the web site and some of them boast a stable of two dozen writers – and then you notice the same collection of writers appear on multiple web sites. And the bios are fluffy: “Lauren is a Mom of 3 living in San Diego and she just loves to share stories about health and nutrition. When not writing, she enjoys hiking with her kids and dogs.” All fluff – rarely mentioning any actual credentials.

The websites have names like “DCNewsNow”, “Distractify”, “BuzzLoving”, “EverydayChirp”, “Fatherly”, “FinanceBuzz”, “Dad Answers All”, “A Dime Save”, “Mama of Five”, “SavvyDime”, “Max My Money”, “Money Talks News”, “Mrs Daaku Studio”, “Newsful”, “PsyPost”, “Secret Life of Mom”,  “OnPoint”, “TheHealthy”, “TheSkimm”, “Viral Chatter”, “Wealth of Geeks”, “Wealthy Nickel”, “Whimsy Soul” and so on. Virtually all look like similar blog run software. Each usually has a theme – travel, personal finance, etc.

There is very little background information that can be verified – in fact, typically, as mentioned earlier, the author’s have little or no online presence. There is no obvious business model.

Sometimes you can find a parent media company like Revir Media Group or Digital Trends Media Group.

This is a huge story – and it has just started to get picked up by a few genuine news outlets.

I hundreds of notes on this – but have not figured out how to document it for the blog.

In the case of Newsbreak, that website is funded by an investment fund in China. And likely, like TikTok, uses its influence to decide what gets promoted and what gets demoted. In effect, these content mills are potentially becoming the largest source of secretive propaganda messaging in world history.