Top news app caught sharing “entirely false” AI-generated news

Sometimes, the AI gets the little details wrong.
In school we always get an assignment to compare the same story in different newspapers. It was amazing to see them all have different details. And that was before the internet existed. So AI here isn't better, just cheaper.
Other times, the AI wholly fabricates events.
We call that Boris Johnson.
- We call that Boris Johnson.
  We call that politicians haha.
- I mean, the AI is worse. It's literally impossible to not be worse, it would need a 100% accuracy to the sample data while also never hallucinating, that's pretty much completely impossible.

Take an article from a reputable publisher, an article for a subject that you are expert in.
Read it and make note of facts they got right and got wrong.
Now apply that same ratio to articles where you have little or no expertise.
These guys are just speed running th at to its inevitable end.
- Take an article from a reputable publisher, an article for a subject that you are expert in.
  Read it and make note of facts they got right and got wrong.
  This is what got me to shake free of some podcasters I placed far too much faith in at one point in the past. When I realized how slanted and fucked their opinion was on things I knew about, it put all their other opinions in a much different light.
  
  Same here used to love Sam Harris and to some extent Joe Rogan, like 2016'ish. Then they got into that whole intellectual dark web nonsense and stayed political instead of trippy brain science and meditation stuff, they started talking about international politics and they are both fucking bigots. Really turned me off hearing Sam basically support the genocide of Palestine.

“When news breaks, we fix it”
- Where is Craig Kilborn when you need him?
- You’re thinking of NewsFix.

The app? Or the news company/network.
- "NewsBreak", a free app with roots in China that is the most downloaded news app in the United States.
  Never heard of it. Hard to believe it's the most downloaded news app. I guess I'm out of touch.
  
  50M+ downloads on Google Play. Hard to verify if farmed tho.
  
  “Most downloaded” just means “biggest phone farm”.
  
  I was expecting it to be Ground News considering how much they advertize on YouTube.
  
  Do most Americans really get their news from Chinese AI now? I can’t really believe that but then sadly maybe I can…
- Yes

Speaking of details wrong:
most downloaded local news app
50,000,000+ downloads
Meanwhile Google News (which does local):
1,000,000,000+ downloads
- Eh, for a while google news was a bake-in app. I'm okay excluding those figures.
  
  Yeah, but "2nd place" (if it's even that) is so far down that many of us including me haven't even heard of it before.

This is a bit of cliche, but still relevant to our current times:
The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.
Antonio Gramsci (Italian Marxist philospher from the turn of the century)
- problem is, that statement can be applied at any given time in history
  
  I think there are times when it is more relevant, e.g. initial change from a feudal/agrarian model to industrialization. By all accounts this was perhaps the biggest, most impactful change in human history.
  One could argue that we are now witnessing a similar transition with respect to the information age.
  At any rate, this was a somewhat glib statement on my part. :)
  
  Maybe that's why he didn't specify which century.

It's almost like they are trying to shoehorn AI into anything and everything regardless of whether it is a good fit, and regardless of whether the technology is ready, and regardless of the outcome. Like blockchain. And IoT. And Angry Birds. (j/k on that last one. Kinda.)
But that's none of my business, I'm just a puppet frog drinking tea.
- This is most definitely a feature here. What ARS won’t say (but their source articles do) is that Newsbreak is an app right out of China. That’s why they don’t care that this creates entirely fictional stories. This is the leftwing equivalent of all those rightwing agitprop sites that pretend to be local news in order to trick people
  
  Oh wow, I did not read the source Reuters article and yeah it's a Chinese project.
  This is the kind of stuff that should make Americans evaluate whether their orthodox and somewhat parochial approach to "free speech" (the polemical definition as opposed to the broad concept) needs updating to reflect modern realities.
  Even before AI and digitization, there were many examples of how an American interpretation of free speech was clearly lacking, but this AI spam and strategic methods used by russia/China are going to make these deficiencies a much more pressing matter.
  
  Oh wow. I've been considering checking out News Break for a bit. I'm glad I saw this.
- Like cloud, too. Behind the Bastards did an episode on these trends. He had an interesting take. I guess “AI” and/or the tech bros who pump and dump these tech trends one after the other were the bastards.

I usually respect ars technical for writing great stories. This time, however, they could've included the name of the app so it wasn't clickbaity. It's newsbreak for those wondering.
- Uh... The very first sentence mmmmm
  After the most downloaded local news app in the US, NewsBreak, shared an AI-generated story about a fake New Jersey shooting last Christmas Eve, New Jersey police had to post a statement online to reassure troubled citizens that the story was "entirely false," Reuters reported.
  
  Right, but the headline doesn't include that to bait you into clicking the article to get that information. Just like every other click bait article about android app issues.

It's an exciting change from legacy media sharing old fashioned, entirely false news.
- False news WITH plausible deniability!

Is it a "top" news service if I've never heard of it?
I've seen false AI gen stories reported by Reuters itself for pity sake.

Future historians will have a lot of trouble identifying fake ai news when studying our current era.

AI news barely able to make Onion obsolete, what a time to be alive!

News about news about fake news, can we go any deeper