In the midst of a national freakout over AI, here’s the latest on what it’s doing to journalism

It’s time for a check-in on how digital outlets that rely partly or entirely on artificial intelligence are hollowing out the already-beleaguered news business. What better time than now, while we’re in the midst of a national freakout over AI? (The latest: Karen Weise and Mike Isaac report in The New York Times on concerns within Microsoft and OpenAI that AI scraping amounts to “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions.”)

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I’ll begin with what strikes me as the most well-intentioned of the projects that have caught my eye recently: Nanopress, which produces morning newsletters for more than 70 communities and neighborhoods in the Boston area by scraping information from local government, civic groups and news organizations.

Interestingly, Nanopress does not use the term “AI” in describing its process:

The reading and drafting are done by software we built. Every morning it reads dozens of local sources: official announcements, local reporting, and community calendars. It checks every story against the page it came from, drops anything it can’t confirm, and links every item back to the original. Nothing is invented.

But Nanopress is an offshoot of Nano Media, “an AI-powered local information platform that monitors sources, processes content, and publishes articles with minimal human intervention.” Nano Media scrapes transcripts of local government meetings and uses AI to write news stories based on those transcripts. There are two sites, one in Arlington, Mass., and one in Bucksport, Maine. Nano Media is a nonprofit, and here’s what it has to say about its mission:

The decline of local journalism has left communities without the reporting they need. Areas without local news see reduced civic participation and increased corruption. Without access to local information, people turn to divisive national content — making it harder to address the issues that matter most.

That’s all well and good except that Arlington already has a vibrant nonprofit digital news outlet that uses real reporters called YourArlington.

Three years ago, Nano Media founders Winston Chen and David Trilling visited our School of Journalism to talk with students about their project. Ian Dartley, then one of our graduate students, now a writer for Boston Globe Media, reported on what they were doing for What Works.

Nanopress represents a different sort of play. Founded by Chen and Marcus Botnen-Chen, the sites scrape information that’s already online and presents it as links with brief snippets. According to the site:

Nanopress compiles a short daily brief of what’s happening in a town. Each item is a one- or two-sentence summary in our own words with a link to the original story, credited by name. We don’t republish articles, we don’t copy photographs, and we don’t put anyone’s reporting behind our own paywall. We don’t have one.

We think that’s a good deal for local publishers: a reader who cares about a story clicks through to you.

The site also asserts that it wants to work with local publishers and urges them to get in touch. But I’ve heard from several local publishers who said Nanopress simply began scraping their content without contacting them. To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with linking, and the news stories that Nanopress aggregates are vastly outnumbered by snippets of civic information and local events from other sources. But the daily Nanopress newsletter could provide a disincentive for subscribing to the local news organization’s newsletter or visiting its website.

In contrast to Nanopress, the story of Uprise RI is a cautionary tale of what can happen when the founder of a digital news outlet walks away without protecting their intellectual property. Aidan Ryan reports in The Boston Globe that after progressive journalist Steve Ahlquist walked away in 2023, the site fell into the hands of a new owner who’s using it to produce AI slop. Ryan writes:

Uprise RI is an unusual case in the continuing creep of AI into media. It’s neither a new site that goes to great pains to disclose how it’s using AI to report and write, nor is it attempting to completely disguise that it’s AI-generated. Instead, it’s landed somewhere in the middle, turning a known local media brand into an entirely automated site with human-looking avatars disguised as reporters.

What happened to Uprise RI was also the subject of Lylah Alphonse’s rant on this week’s “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney” (click here and scroll ahead to 22:30). Alphonse is the Globe’s Rhode Island and New Hampshire editor.

The Uprise RI story is merely a microcosm of what’s happening on a larger scale. On Thursday, Futurism published a massive 7,500-word investigative report on three brothers — Justin, Lachlan and Brendan Brown — who have built an AI slop empire by acquiring respected digital publications and loading them up with garbage. Maggie Harrison Dupré and Jon Christian write:

Over the past few years, BBM [Brown Brothers Media] has pioneered a remarkably cynical business model. First it buys online publications that have established themselves as offering a distinctive type of journalism, like coverage of space travel, parenting advice, or business news. Then it floods their websites with dizzying torrents of AI-generated content — many thousands of articles per month, by our count — in a bid to soak up as many readers as possible via Google and other platforms.

BBM’s network of sites may be attracting as many as 65 million page views a month, about the same as NPR, CBS News and The Washington Post. Yet it appears to have no more than a dozen employees, which means that the revenue generated by Google ads — a pittance for a large news organization — is enough to make BBM a pretty lucrative enterprise. It’s loaded with fake writers who have fake bios as well. And though BBM appears to be in violation of Google’s policies, Harrison Dupré and Christian found that the tech giant is asleep at the switch.

Calling BBM’s network a “trainwreck-laden funhouse mirror of a respectable media company,” they write:

What BBM has accomplished would be impressive if it wasn’t so dark. At a moment when legitimate news organizations are struggling to survive, it has raked in untold hundreds of millions of eyeballs — and likely formidable amounts of revenue via its advertisement-laden sites — by polluting the media ecosystem with noxious AI clickbait designed to do little else but trick Google’s algorithms. Every reader it steals in this way is prevented from supporting a real publication, and many may become turned off from engaging with the media in the future due to the abysmal quality of BBM’s work.

I’ve written a lot about so-called pink-slime sites, but I’m not sure that either Uprise RI or BBM meet the standard definition — that is, they are not purporting to be legitimate news sites while surreptitiously advancing a political agenda. Rather, these projects are strictly moneymaking endeavors, especially BBM.

Also this week, the Local News Initiative at Northwestern’s Medill School released its third annual survey on how residents who live in the Chicago area get their news. Not surprisingly, survey respondents expressed deep skepticism about AI, with 52% saying they are uncomfortable with using it to produce news stories based on a reporter’s notes — and that, arguably, is an ethical (though in my view overly aggressive) use of AI. The study includes this:

The results overall showed palpable distrust of AI in the newsgathering, reporting and writing process. This discomfort transcended many facets. Survey takers were not comfortable with journalists using AI to write stories, decide which stories to prioritize, create images, personalize coverage or even summarize the news.

AI is not going to disappear from journalism, and there are some uses that have become routine. I use it to transcribe interviews (I double-check quotes), to search for information (with verifiable links) and to brainstorm interview questions (with mixed results). Summarizing government meetings so that actual reporters can follow up on anything newsworthy is worthwhile, too — but not to produce robot-written stories

But the purpose of news isn’t just to provide information — it’s to serve as an engine of civic engagement. That’s something AI can’t do.