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One of the most highly-trafficked financial news websites in the world is creating AI-generated stories that bear an uncanny resemblance to stories published just hours earlier by other competitors:
Investing.com, a Tel Aviv-based site owned by Joffre Capital, is a financial news and information hub that provides a mix of markets data and investing tips and trends. But increasingly, the site has been relying on AI to create its stories, which often appear to be thinly-veiled copies of human-written stories written elsewhere.
[...] Pere Monguió, the head of content at FXStreet, told Semafor in an email that he and his team noticed several months ago that Investing was publishing stories similar to their site's articles. FXStreet's 60-person team monitors and quickly analyzes developments in global currencies. By pumping out AI articles, Investing was eroding FXStreet's edge, Monguió said.
"Using AI to rewrite exclusive content from competitors is a threat to journalism and original content creation," he said.
[...] "This isn't truly a new thing," Lawrence Greenberg, senior vice president and chief legal officer at The Motley Fool, said in an email. "We have seen, and acted against, people plagiarizing our content from time to time, and if you're right about what's going on, AI has achieved a level of human intelligence that copies good content and makes it mediocre."
See also: Sports Illustrated Published Articles by Fake, AI-Generated Writers
(Score: 3, Interesting) by sonamchauhan on Wednesday December 13 2023, @10:06AM (5 children)
Not false content. But something only tangentially related to the story, that a reporter would not throw in
Catch then in the act
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Ox0000 on Wednesday December 13 2023, @11:30AM (3 children)
Map makers tend to do this routinely: non-existing streets or features, weird curves, oddly misspelled names.
It's a form of steganography, if you will
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Wednesday December 13 2023, @01:28PM (2 children)
It's a well known tactic to put a couple of "bananas" into a PhD thesis to see whether the invigilators actually read it. Inverse steganography?
(Score: 4, Funny) by Tork on Wednesday December 13 2023, @04:51PM (1 child)
Anyway I did just make my wordcount, but it cost me fifty cents.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 14 2023, @10:12AM
Maybe learning to be more verbose is good if you're trying to be someone paid by wordcount. But in most work related scenarios I've encountered, succinctness is usually preferable to verbosity.
In contrast if school "education" required stuff like X number of humorous events, Y number of characters, Z number of plot twists, etc then it might help produce more people who think about things at a higher level than wordcount.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 13 2023, @02:14PM
So they lose credibility or maybe even get into legal trouble if they run stories without fixing the problems.
But if they're clever, this won't work or could be risky.
(Score: 4, Informative) by istartedi on Wednesday December 13 2023, @10:06AM (7 children)
I had my suspicions, but really noticed it when the market tanked at the beginning of the pandemic. Financial "news" sites continued to run "analysis" pieces with headlines like, "Why is WalMart down 5% today?". You'd click on the link and it was formulaic commentary about sales, trends, etc. that might have flown otherwise, albeit as rather bland; but it was obvious to anybody not living under a rock that WalMart was down 5% because the entire market was down about 5%. The tide had gone out, and bot publishers were now naked.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Ox0000 on Wednesday December 13 2023, @11:34AM (3 children)
I don't remember who said this:
Financial news sites are those pebbles...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 13 2023, @01:33PM (1 child)
I thought they are the poop-ers.
(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Wednesday December 13 2023, @03:05PM
(Score: 2) by Tork on Wednesday December 13 2023, @04:53PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday December 13 2023, @12:31PM (2 children)
What the financial news caters to is the notion that if somebody pays super-close attention to the market, they'll beat the professional traders and their carefully calibrated algorithms. Which they won't, because those carefully calibrated algorithms will generally have responded to whatever the article is about in the amount of time it takes the most attentive of individual investors to receive and read the headline.
Trying to beat the market as an individual investor is like trying to beat the casino at the slot machines.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 13 2023, @02:31PM (1 child)
Actually the real problem is when the big players lose they get their trades rolled back or at least some of them.
When the small timers win doing similar stuff they often get arrested and convicted: https://www.cnbc.com/id/39664612 [cnbc.com]
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quote_stuffing [wikipedia.org]
And: https://www.bbc.com/news/explainers-51265169 [bbc.com]
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/29/flash-crash-trader-navinder-singh-sarao-sentenced-to-home-detention.html [cnbc.com]
So if you're not one of the approved big fish if you win doing the same things the big fish do you could end up in prison.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday December 13 2023, @06:04PM
Yes, the house also frequently rigs the game in its favor (LIBOR, the bank bailouts of 2008-9, etc). Which is a separate issue from the financial media misleading its audience in an effort to pretend that watching / reading their outlet will somehow un-rig the game.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 5, Insightful) by theluggage on Wednesday December 13 2023, @12:07PM (3 children)
We all know Sturgeon's Revelation that 90% of everything is crud. However, thanks to Artificial Incontinence we should have that up to 99.9% by 2025.
Everybody worries about everything from AI taking away everybody's job to re-enacting the plot of Terminator, but the clear and present danger seems to be Large Language Models launching a denial-of-service attack on reason by automatically generating a million nonsense articles from Google's top 100 searches. Not something that the human race ever needed any help with, but human fingers can only type so many words of plausible nonsense a minute. LLMs are to bullshit what email was to the 409 scam.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday December 13 2023, @12:45PM
What will almost definitely make things worse: AI generated BS + barely-peer-reviewed open access journals = the appearance of legitimate academic support for literally any position at all. And it's pretty much guaranteed that most people won't notice the difference between a citation of an article published in, say, the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology versus an article published in the Journal of the ACM. Even if the article in question is this [stanford.edu].
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 13 2023, @01:04PM (1 child)
> ... the 409 scam.
I think you meant the 419 scam?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance-fee_scam [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 5, Touché) by theluggage on Wednesday December 13 2023, @02:04PM
Shush - you're spoiling the clever trap I set to catch any AI that dares to recycle my post!
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday December 13 2023, @05:19PM
The whole thing reads like a company that digs ditches by hand with manual laborers bitching about that brand new "steam shovel" where one dude with a machine can outdig the entire other company.
Journalists told all the blue collar people they should learn2code, turnabout is fair play. Now its the journalists who need to learn2code.
The irony is the employment outlook looks a zillion times better for blue collar folks than white collar folks over the next couple decades.
Future generations are going to look really weirdly at Dilbert cartoons; the future for art history majors is not going to be working as Dilbert's boss, now their future looks like praying for UBI while part timing at Starbucks. If you can do all your homework for a college major using Bard and ChatGPT, you'd better change majors ASAP... It's like all the office workers from decades ago who are now replaced by REST APIs and some very small Python scripts.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday December 13 2023, @05:30PM (3 children)
That's a very wordy description of clickbait, an AI would have a more succinct word choice.
When you combine a world consisting entirely of clickbait with classic Dead Internet Theory, we have bots generating articles to be pretend clicked on by other bots. All funded... for now... by ad money.
When this scam inevitably blows up, it's going to make the dotcom crash look like a minor blip.
I don't know of a good financial vehicle to make a profit off knowing an entire industry sector is fraudulent. You can't get humans to buy more stuff by having bots write articles for bots to click on. Its easy to create a financial model where you track / graph the marginal return on every new $1 of ad spend, and watch it decline, but where's the tipping point where you start shorting ad networks and clickbait farmers? If you wait until the marginal return drops to zero you'll probably wait too long. Wait until it approaches commercial borrowing interest rate, if its not possible to make money buying ads then people won't borrow money to buy them...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 13 2023, @06:45PM (1 child)
Or, you know, you could be patient, buy quality stocks in market segments that match your risk-targets (some sectors fluctuate in price much more than others)...and for the most part hold them. Isn't this the Vanguard mutual fund approach?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday December 14 2023, @04:02PM
How would any of that leverage my knowledge of fraud in an industry sector?
I guess, invest outside the fraudulent sector LOL?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 14 2023, @12:04AM
Periodically buy small amounts of puts that are well above water and more than a year out in the stocks in question. If you're right, it'll pay out at some point and justify all the puts that didn't make it. Or you could short the stock and post on decision maker sites like SN to persuade the masses to make you rich!