| NEWS | Wayward and Botstein Fake news bots mangle real stories with silly wording, but dangerous implications. BY ELIAS WEISS out to solve the minor mystery. On June 4, 2009, New Times reported Michael Brian Miller had murdered his wife and daughter and critically injured his son with a kitchen knife in the family’s Glendale home. Miller was sentenced to life in prison in S December 2009 and remains behind bars with no chance for parole. Not much has happened with the case since. But in recent weeks, Miller’s name began to resurface across the internet and on people’s social media feeds. Hundreds and hundreds of times. Between March 20 and 22, oodles of mangled versions of our story were posted to websites everywhere. Like a twisted kids’ game of telephone, robots used artificial intelligence software to rehash our news brief over and over. With each permutation, just as in tele- phone, the message got increasingly garbled. The story became more unread- able — and despite the somber subject — hilarious with each permutation. But media experts see this bizarre phenomenon as a dangerous development in the fake news epidemic, with devas- tating implications for journalists and news consumers alike. “This will lead to certain death and injury,” Retha Hill, executive director of ome of you may have noticed that a short Phoenix New Times story from 2009 has been trending on the website for weeks. New Times folks wondered why, and set the New Media Innovation and Entrepreneurship Lab at Arizona State University, told Phoenix New Times. In the original New Times story, our old friend Ray Stern wrote, “In another twist, Miller claimed he stabbed his son the most because he loved him the most.” On March 20, a Turkish entertainment news website called tvguidetime.com published a reworked version, saying, “Since he esteemed his youngster the most, the factory administrator announced that he had harmed him the most in another breeze.” A hallmark of this AI software is mistaking last names for common nouns, often replacing “Miller” with “mill oper- ator” or “factory worker.” Some variation of this gibberish appears in every single replication. In the original story Stern also wrote, “Cops who arrived at the scene found Miller was honest about his crime: His wife and 10-year-old daughter were dead. His 4-year-old son was critically injured. Miller had taken a knife to them; officers encountered a bloody horror show.” Robots on an Icelandic entertainment news website called travotkt.com had a hard time with that line. This was the result: “Cops purportedly confirmed up on the scene immediately and situated Miller doesn’t normally fiddle alongside along with his harmful habits: his very important completely different and 10-year-old woman have been every lifeless. Mill operator’s 4-year-old little one was furthermore said to have been genu- inely stung. Mill operator had positioned a blade to them reality be suggested; authori- ties should confront a frightening terrible- ness presentation.” Companies like QuillBot, Inc., a Chicago-based AI software developer, offer free programs online that paraphrase text and help dodgy websites replicate the work of journalists for monetary gain. Each site is littered with ads that generate revenue every time a person clicks the link. “It makes almost no sense after going through the transformation, which makes it doubly weird,” Dan Gillmor, director of News Co/Lab, told New Times. News Co/Lab is an initiative to elevate news literacy and awareness at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. A leading chronicler of the dot-com boom, Gillmor started writing a blog for The Mercury News in San Jose, California, in 1999, which is believed to have been the first by a journalist for a traditional media company. In 2005, he worked with a startup venture in citizen journalism called Bayosphere, which aimed to “make it easier for the public to report and publish on the Internet.” But there is another side to the advent of widespread online publishing. “While I wouldn’t call this an example of plagiarism, it’s obviously lame and — especially if it’s designed to create revenue-producing internet traffic — unethical,” Gillmor said. But Dan Barr, a veteran media lawyer in Phoenix, claims these shadowy website operators are breaking the law. “It’s copyright infringement,” Barr told New Times. “By using an algorithm to get similar words, it’s still replicating somebody else’s work and seeking to profit off of it.” Willful copyright infringement can result in criminal penalties including imprisonment of up to five years and fines of up to $250,000 per offense. It’s a problem that has existed in recent years in the academic sphere, Barr said. University professors have grappled with their students using paraphrasing soft- ware to evade plagiarism detectors since at least 2017. Now it’s cropping up in journalism, in stories you might read. “Any time they’re not attributing where they got the source material from, of course, it’s plagiarism,” said Hill. “But it has been butchered so much that it almost The People Speak doesn’t have much relationship to the original piece.” Hill was responsible for launching WashingtonPost.com in 1995, and continues to study the intersection between journalism and technology at Arizona State. None of the websites hosting mutilated versions of the New Times’ 2009 story offer a way to contact them. The sites, mostly based in Asia, are hosted by generic internet domain registrars like Tempe- based GoDaddy Inc. Paraphrasing from news reports and attributing properly is nothing new in the field of journalism. Even industry titans like The Associated Press have rolled out robots that generate and publish news content. But this is different. “By changing every word, it is almost like another category of thievery,” Hill said. “It’s dangerous for a reader. It fosters distrust of the media.” Call it “fake news,” if you like. After a certain number of permutations, the fake news bots began to get details of Miller’s case flat wrong. The tvguidetime.com article calls Miller’s wife, Adriana, an “accomplice” in the crime. In reality, she was one of >> p 16 14 APRIL 28TH– MAY 4TH, 2022 PHOENIX NEW TIMES | MUSIC | CAFE | FILM | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | FEATURE | NEWS | OPINION | FEEDBACK | CONTENTS | phoenixnewtimes.com
