Nobody was aware that CNET had been using AI to write articles for months

Go check out OpenAI’s ChatGPT if you haven’t already; it’s frightfully adept at writing. It will produce a semi-original paper with citations within the text and nearly perfect grammar (the data will be gathered from online sources, but it will pass plagiarism checks just fine). In fact, CNET has been posting complete articles produced by AI on its platform for months since the AI is that good.

CNET, a tech and news website, has been using “automation technology” to generate financial explanatory articles since about November 2022. Each post has a little dropdown stating that it was not written by a human. Although CNET is not exactly concealing it, it was generally overlooked until Wednesday’s remark by Twitter user Gael Breton, as noted by Futurism.

Breton comments in the discussion, “For now, it’s a small-scale test as we only see 72 outcomes disclosed as written by AI.

“And it appears like Google could care less about it, as numerous of these pages have received a lot of search traffic as a result. Soooo.. Is AI stuff now acceptable?

Will Google start penalizing AI content, or will the top pages have quickly automated stuff that is probably well-optimized for SEO? Google has previously stated that they will make an effort to stop AI content from overrunning their website, but in order to do so, Google would first need to figure out how to recognize such information, which would be an enormous process without the massive wording in bold already present on CNET stories.

The automated author in question is “CNET Money,” who has written 73 explanation pieces for CNET about various aspects of finance, such as “Overdraft Fees vs. Nonsufficient Funds Fees: What’s the Difference?” and “What Is Zelle and How Does It Work?” Although editorial staff members (humans) verify each piece to make sure it doesn’t include any nonsense, the majority of the information is derived from AI. You should see for yourself; it’s quite remarkable.

With nearly perfect blog posts and college essays just one prompt away, AI has the ability to quickly permeate a large range of writing sectors. Although there are efforts underway in US schools to outlaw their use in academic settings, it is yet unknown how successful these efforts will be and whether anybody will develop a trustworthy method to distinguish AI-generated information. There is no doubt that this is only the beginning.