The Digital Masquerade:

Unmasking AI’s Phantom Journalists

By Tony Eastin and Sandeep Abraham, CAMS

Part 1: The Rise of Synthetic News, Dark PR, and the Impact on User Trust. 

Introduction

Have you ever paused while reading a news article and asked yourself, "Did the author actually write this?" Honestly, it's not a question that frequently crosses our minds. We're aware that editors might tweak an article before it reaches the public, yet it's almost second nature to trust that the named authors are the true architects of the stories we read. However, in a digital landscape increasingly dominated by AI-generated content and specifically AI-generated news, it's time to reassess our assumptions about the origins of these narratives. 

Like millions of retail investors constantly looking for accurate and timely information about investment opportunities, I often turn to platforms like Google, Yahoo Finance, and even Reddit. Some time in late 2023, I was researching a pharmaceutical company on Google News, when it served me a link to the Clayton County Register, a site I had never heard of before. Despite several signs of inauthentic origin, authorship, and AI-generated content, Clayton County Register, the official newspaper of Elkader, Iowa, had content about pharmaceutical stock trading news that Google News deemed most relevant for me.

This discovery quickly morphed into an investigation of the widening landscape of AI-driven journalism, uncovering a realm where technology blurs the line between fact and fiction. Research from misinformation watchdog NewsGuard revealed a significant uptick in AI-generated news websites, skyrocketing by more than 1000 percent since May 2023, from 49 sites to more than 600 as of this writing. A recent article by 404 Media found that Google News amplifies the reach of these sites as well, and Google has previously confirmed that it will treat AI-generated content equally in search results. As generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Bard rapidly improve and remove barriers to monetized rapid publishing, an enormous opportunity emerges for various malicious actors to push out mis- and disinformation for financial, political, or personal gain. 

Our investigation is an essential read, especially for those in the financial sector, who need to stay a step ahead of misinformation. It breaks down the complex mechanics of AI-driven disinformation, unravels methods, motives, and impact of this deceptive content, and how far some of these bad actors are willing to go to influence their target audience. We offer practical insights on sifting through the digital noise, pinpointing reliable information, and navigating this vast digital masquerade. 

Breaking Down the AI-Journalism Landscape

Though our discovery started with the Clayton County Register, the world of proliferating AI-generated news content that we found roughly broke down into 3 categories, ranging from the least deceptive and risky to the most:

1. (THE GOOD) Authentic Author + Transparent Use of Gen-AI Content: This includes mainstream, established financial news sites and news aggregators that have begun offering Gen-AI articles, primarily for financial figures reporting on a predictable cadence. The bylines and footnotes for these articles explicitly indicate and credit generative AI tools or vendors.

2. (THE BAD) (Semi) Authentic Author + Deceptive Use of Gen-AI Content: We discovered organizations that pose as regular public relations and digital marketing agencies with real employees and writers. Yet, when we examined the articles and how frequently they were published, we found these organizations hid the fact that they were AI-generated and even presented them as accurate and factual when they were demonstrably false. 

3. (THE UGLY) Inauthentic Author + Deceptive Use of Gen-AI Content: This last category includes our deep-dive case study of Clayton County Register and features scores of completely fabricated authors publishing hundreds of AI-generated articles each day. These articles are reshared on social media and news aggregators, giving them legitimacy and influence, while their true creators, their intentions, and their profits stay hidden. 

The Good: The Dawn of (Legitimate) Gen-AI News

Let’s make one thing clear: the threat in our story and analysis is not the rise of AI-generated news articles. Prominent news outlets like the Associated Press, have responsibly used this technology since 2018 to cover events like the NCAA basketball tournament. News outlets including CNBC, the Washington Post, and CNET, have all been at the forefront of this shift, integrating "Robo Reporters" into their newsrooms, while clearly labeling their AI-generated content so readers understand how it was created.

The true threats we discovered and analyzed in our report are twofold: First, malicious actors create fake authors to publish AI-generated content under these fictitious authors to deceive the public. These fake authors sometimes have the names of real celebrities or public figures to intentionally hide their fictional identities among search results of real people. Second, malicious actors are leveraging AI-generated technology to create fake stories and attempt to pass them off as factual news. 

Yet, as we will see with the BestStocks.com network below, there are also up-and-coming organizations of real people with a mix of real and fake credentials and histories deceptively publishing AI-generated content. 

The Bad: Dark PR Firms And Gen-AI

A key goal of Public Relations (PR) firms is to influence opinions, manage reputations, and create a favorable image for their clients. Traditional PR firms typically have a set of ethical standards to uphold their credibility. However, there are Dark PR firms that will create influence campaigns and use false information (ie. disinformation) as a tactic to achieve their objectives. The  Bestocks.com network, and MediaCoverage.com under it, are one such Dark PR firm.

First question: Is BestStocks even a company in the real world? Can we find the offices of these organizations in real life? We found we could not. The Contact pages for both BestStocks.com and MediaCoverage.com both list +1​​4158004138 as their contact phone number and 3501 Jack Northrop Ave, Hawthorne, CA 90250, USA as their address. However, that phone number is an unused virtual number that was formerly a landline number allocated to San Francisco, CA. A Google Maps search told us that address was the address for Shipito, which provides “International Parcel Forwarding Services”, but which FourSquare comments indicate might be a drop point for shipping fraud. BestStocks’ authenticity is not off to a great start.

While the Clayton County Register leverages fake authors to disseminate AI-generated content, other sites will serve up AI-generated content as real news to disseminate fake stories attached to “real authors''. Beststocks.com and mediacoverage.com, both of which are owned by Roberto Liccardo, leverage this tactic to conduct PR and SEO campaigns. In the “About us” section of Media Coverage, they claim to be a “team of experienced journalists and industry experts committed to providing you with the latest and most accurate information on a wide range of topics, from finance and technology to politics and the economy.” Diving deeper into the content of these “journalists”, however, we find a very different story.

Take Elaine Mendonca, for example. She began working for BestStocks and Media Coverage in 2020 and is already credited with writing over 109,000 articles, which - given basic time-consuming journalistic processes of research, analysis, verification, writing, editing, eating, and sleeping - is an impossible feat. There’s no doubt she’s a real person; she’s got Facebook and Instagram accounts with photos of her with Roberto Liccardo:

On MuckRack, Elaine is shown as a regular contributor to various online publications, including Best Stocks, Media Coverage, Digital Journal, Observer-Reporter, and several others. Remarkably, she reportedly wrote over 100 articles in a single day, each distinct in content. Further investigation into Elaine Mendonca's background uncovers a curious case of digital identity mix-up. On BestStocks.com and MediaCoverage.com, Elaine Mendonca is an accomplished editor-in-chief with a finance degree and an MBA with CFA and CMT certifications,

which sharply contrasts with Elaine Mendonca on LinkedIn, who appears content with a Bachelor's in Communication and Media Studies from UC Berkeley.

But Elaine represents just a fragment of the broader tableau of this organization’s authors and their content, all revealing similar schemes of deception. 

Fake News Articles

When diving deeper into the content published on MediaCoverage and BestStocks we find that these authors will create fictitious stories with Generative-AI to promote their objectives. For instance, on July 2nd, Mrs. Mendonca published a story on Media Coverage titled: “Calton & Associates Inc. Expands Investment Portfolio with Invesco BulletShares 2030 Corporate Bond ETF”. The article, which is listed under the “World Economy” section of the site, claims that Calton & Associates Inc. purchased 11,540 shares of 2030 corporate ETF bonds. The article continues by admiring this company’s “unparalleled ability to adapt and thrive within an ever-changing financial ecosystem”. The problem with this story is that it’s completely false. 

It’s not until we get to the last paragraph after the conclusion, that we see that Mrs. Mendonca forgot to remove the ChatGPT disclaimer that states that the article “utilizes fictional details provided by OpenAIs GPT-3 language model.” 

When conducting a reverse search for the same terminology across the entire site, we found more than 260 ChatGPT-produced articles (as of this writing) that these authors used to publish fictional investment analyses for the public.

We are fairly confident that the  ChatGPT disclaimers on MediaCoverage are an oversight. The same type of story and topic was published on the same day, by two different authors, Mrs Mendonca, and Roberto Liccardo (CEO of MediaCoverage), but one of them had the disclaimer, while the one published by Mr. Liccardo did not.

Both sites are primarily found organically by their target audience, which demonstrates their strong SEO capability. In the period from October through December 2023, MediaCoverage saw 622,000 visitors, and BestStocks had 1.3M visitors in the same period. 

While both sites get a miniscule amount of their traffic from social media channels (2.98% for MediaCoverage and 0.53% for BestStocks), this aligns with their goals of influencing retail and professional investors to make speculative investments, as well as driving traffic to their websites. Even encrypted, messaging-only platforms like WhatsApp generated traffic for BestStocks, implying trusted interactions among close contacts are trafficking in fake information.

What’s the Impact?

We found that Best Stocks and Media coverage are deliberately disseminating false information under the guise of a “team of experienced journalists and industry experts”. Our research shows that these sites are able to generate significant quarterly traffic and are referenced across various social media platforms. Worse, is the apparent ignorance of the public to the information operation that they are being exposed to, and the deceptive practice executed by this organization. 

On Reddit, beststocks.com is referenced frequently on numerous subreddits, including r/retailtrading, r/moneymakers, and many others. Despite this wide reach, our investigation into the comment sections of these subreddits showed no user awareness or discussion regarding the site’s deceptive practices. This lack of recognition or challenge to the site’s credibility demonstrates the effectiveness of their information operation campaign. 

On LinkedIn, this operation plays out more insidiously. Employees from the companies featured in Media Coverage's reports are sometimes found praising the site's journalistic integrity. This creates a deceptive facade of credibility, as these commendations echo through networks of unsuspecting friends and professional connections. The audience, engaged and responsive, remains largely unaware of the underlying ruse. They are inadvertently complicit in amplifying a narrative that, unbeknownst to them, is steeped in deceit. The information, while widely regarded as credible and extensively shared, is part of a calculated campaign aimed at altering public perception.

We have now cracked the thin veneer of legitimacy BestStocks held onto and shed light on its deceptive “journalism”, especially in contrast to actual, responsible news organizations that use AI-generated articles. In Part 2, we’ll dive into Clayton County Register, a far more effective, viral AI-generated news site with completely fictional authors, and its hidden puppet master playing a larger game.

Part 2: Malicious and Advanced Gen-AI News Networks, and how we navigate this ecosystem

In Part 1, we found that AI-generated news is a phenomenon that is here to stay, and that it can be extremely efficient and timely when published responsibly with full transparency. However, dark PR firms like the BestStocks network are more than willing to flood our information ecosystem with not just fictional AI-generated news posing as real, but a dizzying variety of false indicators of legitimacy. Even if they are real people, their credentials and intentions are suspicious and most importantly - they are marketing fiction as timely news.

Now, we look at claytoncountyregister.com, the discovery of which kicked off this entire investigation and project. This site squarely falls within the “Inauthentic Author + Deceptive Use of Gen-AI Content” category, meaning all the writers on the site are fictional and all its AI-generated content is marketed as true, factual, original news. Yet, the rabbit hole that finally led us to the site’s real owner revealed a much larger, more sinister network of deception.

The Ugly: Clayton County Register and Unmasking Malicious Gen-AI Puppet Masters

The Clayton County Register masquerades as a modest newspaper in Iowa - at least, that's the impression it intends to create. On the official Clayton County, Iowa government website, you'll find listings for local newspapers like the Guttenberg Press and the Outlook Newspaper, which serves Monona. The Clayton County Register is also listed, ostensibly catering to Elkader. However, a brief comparison of these three news outlets reveals stark differences.

In contrast to its counterparts, the Clayton County Register features no local news about Elkader or Clayton County. Intriguingly, every image on the site appears to be generated by AI. The publication offers its content in both English and Spanish, which is particularly unexpected given that the 2020 census indicates only 343 people, or 2% of Clayton County's population, identify as Hispanic or Latino. Moreover, the focus of the articles is predominantly on financial news, diverging from the local community-centric content typically expected from a regional newspaper. Hidden deep within certain articles, we found evidence of AI-generated content with the sentence: “It’s important to note that this information was auto-generated by Automated Insights”. 

We suspect that the sporadic AI disclaimer on the site reflects an oversight by the website’s administrator. We base this on finding this disclaimer on only a small number of articles, despite similarities in tone, message structure, and content across all the stories, indicating a high likelihood of AI-generated content. But what makes the evidence of AI-generated content even more compelling across the entire site are the supposed authors who have written these stories. 

Unmasking Fake Authors

The "Contact Us" page of the Register names six individuals: Chief Editor Jennifer Pressman, Producers Lira Mercer, Barret Loux, Emmanuel Ellerbee, and Manager Karil-W. Huelsenbeck. An online search for these names leads to a motley array of results, predominantly linked to well-known personalities who have no association with the Clayton County Register. For instance, Jennifer Pressman shares her name with an Italian TV actress, Lira Mercer is known as a model and social media influencer with a massive following, and Emmanuel Ellerbee is an XFL linebacker. None of these namesakes have any professional ties to the Register. Still, these fake names are only the tip of this AI-generated iceberg.

What makes AI-generated content appealing is how easy it is to write articles and stories in a short amount of time. Sites like Muckrack reveal how many stories each of those individuals supposedly wrote for this news organization. According to Muckrack, as of November 5th, 2023, our supposed XFL player, Emmanuel Ellerbee, has penned over 14,882 articles for the Register, including an astounding 50 on that day alone. This is incredibly impressive considering that even an accomplished journalist like the Wall Street Journal’s Sam Goldfarb has “only” written one article today and 832 articles in the span of his career.

Similar astonishing figures are found for the other names on the Register's contact page: Barret Loux with 15,236 articles, Jorge Diaz with 14,841, and Karil-W. Huelsenbeck surpassing 15,000. When these extraordinary numbers are considered collectively, it becomes clear that the Clayton County Register is an AI-driven platform for financial news. This leads us to ponder the motivations behind creating such a site and the potential implications of its existence.

Who is this for? What Audience and Advertisers Analytics Tell Us

In trying to understand the intentions or goals behind Clayton County Register AI-generated content, it is helpful to look at audience and marketing analytics - who is coming to this website, how they found it, and what they are looking for on it. Who benefits from the existence of AI-generated content on the Clayton County Register website and the traffic to it?

Here we turn to Similar Web, a tool renowned for its competitive intelligence and SEO analytics capabilities. Similar Web offers valuable insights into the traffic patterns of the Clayton County Register. Notably, the domain ownership details for the website were updated in August 2023, coinciding with a site redesign and the emergence of AI-generated content, suggesting a change in management around this time. Looking at website traffic distribution channels from September to November 2023, Similar Web reveals a total of 413,114 visits to claytoncountyregister.com, of which over 60% came from organic searches and over 25% came from direct contact with the website. Most of this traffic came from mobile users. 

The vast majority of organic search traffic was non-branded, meaning people were searching for other topics when the search engine presented them with a very relevant SEO-optimized headline from Clayton County Register:

Diving deeper, the top five organic search terms that brought users to the website included “Clayton County Register” itself, but also one term related to stock purchasing, one to a potential new medical breakthrough, and one to the market-changing resignation of a top Amazon executive:

Next, we look at social media distribution channels for Clayton County Register content, which makes up 2.46% of the referred traffic to the Clayton County Register website. Reddit makes up nearly half of the referred social traffic for Sept-Nov 2023, which tracks how we discovered this site. These analytics do not reveal which sub-groups or people specifically are sharing Clayton County Register links, but Reddit is organized around topic-relevant subreddits, whereas Twitter and LinkedIn are more open-ended broadcast channels. 

And when it comes to gaining legitimacy and traction, especially in financial news, Clayton County Register is extremely effective on Reddit. Cryptocurrency-relevant subreddits, in particular, seem to use Clayton County Register as a reliable source for cryptocurrency speculation:

Similar Web also shows us "Referring websites" or websites that send direct clicks to the Clayton County Register. Here, the leading referrer is Meltwater.com, a globally renowned competitive intelligence firm with a client roster featuring heavyweights like Google and Coca-Cola. It is more likely that Meltwater's platform inadvertently includes AI-generated or low-quality news content, rather than actively sponsoring the Clayton County Register. Accompanying Meltwater in the top five referrers identified by Similar Web are various RSS aggregators and smaller intelligence firms. Nonetheless, the involvement of Meltwater, a firm celebrated for its competitive intelligence prowess, in directing clients to potentially inauthentic, AI-generated content raises significant concerns for both the company and its clientele.

With all this information, we have a good idea of how the website owner intends to reach specific audiences, but we do not yet know why. Within the same period of Sept-Dec 2023, only 2 websites directly received (not through the Google Display ad network) traffic to them from claytoncountyregister.com: Tickmill.eu and Blackhat.com. Blackhat.com represents the annual Black Hat cybersecurity event series and received nearly ⅓ of outgoing non-Google ad traffic from Clayton County Register. The analyzed time period coincides with Europe’s BlackHat conference in December, but hy a premier cybersecurity organization chooses to advertise next to deceptive AI-generated articles by fake authors is anyone’s guess. When asked about this, Blackhat’s marketing team did not respond.

However, the biggest non-Google ad traffic beneficiary on claytoncountyregister.com was lp.tickmill.edu, the landing page for the European branch of online financial trading and betting site, Tickmill Ltd.:

Tickmill primarily manages trading in various financial markets, including Forex, stock indices, bonds, commodities, and cryptocurrencies. However, Tickmill also has a 3.6/5 rating on company credibility rating site Trustpilot and nearly 20% of Trustpilot reviews claim it is a low-quality broker. The company is headquartered in the Seychelles and its EU office is registered in Cyprus, both of which are jurisdictions with strong reputations for corruption and money laundering. 

If the content on Clayton County Register is served to people looking for competitive intelligence and stock trading trips, then those people would also likely be excited to sign up for an asset trading platform promising short-term large gains. As a direct advertiser outside Google’s ad networks, Tickmill likely benefits the most from the content, SEO optimization, and traffic referrals from claytoncountyregister.com.

Now that we know who the intended audience and primary beneficiaries of the AI-generated authors and content on claytoncountyregister.com are - who is the mastermind behind all this? 

Attribution: Uncovering a Deception Network and its Creator

Claytoncountyregister.com, like many websites - both shady and benign - uses Cloudflare hosting to obscure the true identities of its owners and operators. Any WHOIS or IP query of the website returns a US-based IP address and Cloudfare as its registered owner. Unlike benign websites, however, Clayton County Register does not list its true owners or provide any true details about its ownership on its website - not in the articles, the Contact Us page, the Privacy Policy page, or even in the HTML/CSS of the site. In these cases, a service like Censys that keeps records of old security certificates can sometimes help connect websites to their true IP addresses - in this case, we found that claytoncountyregister.com is actually hosted on a Linux server in Germany.

We then verified that the IP address 167.235.114.190 still connects to claytoncountyregister.com using the Client URL (or cURL) command in the MacOS Terminal. This sends a simple GET request to the IP address and returns the information of any URL or website hosted on it.

We also queried the IP address on the internet device search engine Shodan.io, and uncovered a few more leads, namely a connection to a Polish website admingers.pl:

The other associated domain your-server.de and static.190.114.235.167.clients.your-server.de resolve to the Hetzner web hosting provider and data center operator used by much of Germany, same as the HETZNER-AS Censys showed. As of this writing (Jan 2024), the Domain Record for admingers.pl on Shodan lists 16 IP addresses that currently resolve or have at some point resolved to admingers.pl. Of these, only 4 IP addresses (167.235.184.211, 168.119.143.118, 167.235.114.190, and 159.69.56.52 are currently associated with admingers.pl as well as a network of 4 other websites, including claytoncountyregister.com:

Shodan.io details 4 websites all seemingly owned by admingers.pl; IP address resolution commonalities are highlighted in red, and website technology commonalities are highlighted in blue.

These 4 IP addresses have some striking similarities among them: the numerically coded hostname with admingers.pl, all are hosted on Hetzner Online servers on the same ASN in Germany, each is a WordPress blog site, and 3 sites use the Litespeed Cache plugin for Wordpress. Each website also features AI-generated content and newsfeed delivery similar to claytoncountyregister.com, and a propensity for deceptively co-opting the legitimacy or cultural weight of the site’s previous owner:

1. Claytoncountyregister.com: Our seed website. Key features include a rolling newsfeed of AI-generated articles by fake authors paired with AI-generated images and a minimalist aesthetic with Google Display network ads in all available negative space. (Ads disabled here for visibility)

2. Aboutxinjiang.net: This one was a surprise. According to the Wayback Machine internet archive, prior to 2014 when the Chinese government began its cultural suppression and incarceration of the Uighur population in its Xinjiang province, this site was hosted by “the Propaganda Department of the Party Committee of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and headed by the Information Office of the People's Government of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.” It was used as propaganda material to attract Han Chinese students to universities in Xinjiang. However, the site was shut down in 2014 and went unused for several years until Polish content was placed on it in mid-2022, likely when the admingers.pl owner bought it. It now looks similar to claytoncountyregister.com.

3. Recypoint.cz: Prior to 2017, this site was a collaboration between Czech recycling company ASRVO and RecyPoint International, an Asian company focused on recycling processing and equipment refurbishment. The domain was abandoned for 6 years before being bought by the admingers.pl owner sometime in 2023. While all its AI-generated articles are in Czech, the majority are suspiciously about the United States, like the one in the following screenshot about Merrimack County, New Hampshire. Similar to claytoncountyregister.com, this site also lists a slate of fake authors using the names of famous Czech artists, athletes, and actors.

4. Isp.page: The newsfeed for this page is found on a specific News tab, but the initial landing page is a map and list of global internet service providers. This is the newest site owned by admingers.pl, created in late 2022. It was initially just a listing page to direct traffic to a Polish VSAT internet provider TS2, indicated by several listings for it in Eastern Europe and a link at the bottom to a similar AI-generated news site, ts2.ai. 

Beyond the domain records, the website content of each of these sites reveals more inauthenticity and deception:

1. The Contact page for aboutxinjiang.com lists another AI-generated site ts2.news and two Facebook pages:

   1. TS2.AI: This page with 10 likes and 24 followers features a feed of AI-generated articles and images, a photo of the company logo for TS2, and links to the AI-generated website ts2.ai (same as linked at the bottom of isp.page above)

      1. The Contact page for ts2.ai features a link to yet another AI-generated website ai2.news, which was listed on the Domain Record for admingers.pl for IP address 142.132.133.61 that does not currently list admingers.pl as a hostname.

         1. Ai2.news has a page header “ANY UAK MEDIA” and the Contact page for ai2.news directs to the contact page for anyuakmedia.com, yet another domain connected to this network, but with the same content. They are likely one and the same website.

   2. AI & Sat Blog: This page has about 8,000 likes and followers. The intro lists ts2.space as its website, which seems to be a legitimate website for the TS2 VSAT internet company. Its feed, however, comprises of the same AI-generated articles and images, but with links to ts2.news

2. The Contact page for recypoint.cz lists a phone number +420377917405, which when Googled reveals the Contact page for another website pohledzvenku.cz with potentially AI-generated older (ends in Oct 2023) articles about soccer news, no images, and a list of fake authors with names of celebrities.

3. The Contact pages of aboutxinjiang.com, ts2.news, ts2.ai, ai2.news, and anyuakmedia.com all list the same fake physical address: Aleje Jerozolimskie 65/79 00-679 Warsaw, Poland, which is the Marriott Hotel in downtown Warsaw.

So we now have a connected network of 9 deceptive websites, some co-opting previously culturally significant websites, but all using SEO-optimized AI-generated articles and images to boost engagement of and drive traffic to specific topics, primarily financial news, investment, AI, and space:

1. Claytoncountyregister.com

2. Aboutxinjiang.com

3. Recypoint.cz

4. Isp.page

5. Ts2.ai

6. Ts2.space

7. Ai2.news

8. Anyuakmedia.com

9. Pohledzvenku.cz

With so many common deceptive behaviors, we had established a behavioral fingerprint with admingers.pl as the biggest suspect. What is admingers.pl? And who is behind it? As of this writing, there is no active website for admingers.pl. The company, founded in 2009, offers IT outsourcing, consulting, and auditing services, but its website shut down in 2020. However, the company is still active on LinkedIn: 

Admingers only has two employees listed on LinkedIn. One was hidden behind LinkedIn privacy settings, but the other is none other than the CEO and founder of Admingers and our likely culprit - Karol Kochanowski:

Two Linkedin posts by DemandSphere in February 2023 that only Karol liked, one an instructional blogpost by DemandSphere on using Chat-GPT for SEO, and the other a post by Google confirming it will treat AI-generated content equally in search results.

In the end, his primary motive seems to have been money. Karol used his skills in system and network administration, his knowledge of SEO and content intelligence from his employer, simple website design software, and generative AI to deceive thousands of people thousands of miles away. He did not care about journalistic integrity, small-town newspaper trust, or financial stability in the United States, controversial and painful cultural events in China, or even Czech environmental optimism. He just saw a quick, automated, and Google-approved way to make a buck. 

Conclusion

Our investigation unveiled the shadowy corners of AI-generated news, a new domain where technology’s promise is perverted into a tool for mass deception. We’ve journeyed from the Clayton County Register, the Admingers network and Karol Kochanowski, and Roberto Liccardo’s Media Coverage-Best Stocks network. Our research exposed not just the proliferation of AI-generated content but the alarming rise of fictitious authors and fake “news” stories crafted to mislead and manipulate. 

The implications of our findings are profound and far-reaching. In a world increasingly reliant on digital news, the ease with which AI can be misused to create convincing but entirely fabricated content poses a significant threat to the integrity of information. As we have shown you here, even sophisticated news aggregation platforms and discerning readers can be duped by this new wave of 'phantom journalism'.

Moreover, the role of AI in enabling the rapid spread of misinformation for financial gain or other nefarious purposes highlights a growing ethical crisis in digital media. As we've seen, this is not a problem confined to obscure sites but one that has infiltrated more mainstream platforms, deceiving even the most vigilant consumers of news.

But this journey does more than just expose the sophisticated tactics of digital deception; it also empowers us as readers to become more discerning consumers of information. In an age where AI-generated content is becoming increasingly prevalent, it's crucial to equip ourselves with the tools and knowledge to discern fact from fiction. Here are some actionable steps you can take to navigate this new landscape:

1. Verify Author and Organization Credentials: Do a quick background check on authors. Are they present on multiple credible news platforms? Do they have a consistent online presence, or do they seem to appear out of nowhere? Does the company have a verifiable real life presence? Do they provide a real address and working phone number by which they can be reached?

2. Scrutinize Writing Style: Look for patterns in writing. AI-generated content often lacks the nuanced storytelling and depth of human journalism. It may be more formulaic or repetitive.

3. Check for Local Relevance: Especially with supposed local news sources, assess whether the content genuinely reflects local issues and communities. 

4. Use Fact-Checking Tools: Utilize online tools and websites dedicated to fact-checking and verifying news sources.

5. Consider the Source: Research the news outlet's history and reputation. Has it been involved in controversies or misinformation before?

6. Be Wary of Unusual Volume: Be skeptical of authors or sites that produce content at an unusually high rate, as this may indicate AI generation.

7. Examine Website Traffic and SEO: Use tools like Similar Web to understand the traffic patterns of a news site, which can reveal insights into its authenticity.

8. Analyze Audience Engagement: Check the engagement levels on social media. Genuine articles typically have more organic and varied interactions.

9. Look for Multiple Sources: If a news story seems significant, check if other reputable sources are reporting on it too.

10. Stay Updated on AI Developments: Understanding the capabilities and limitations of current AI technologies can provide context for what is possible in AI-generated content.

This report serves as a clear call for increased vigilance and a re-evaluation of how we consume and trust digital content. It underscores the necessity for more robust verification mechanisms in news aggregation and social media platforms, along with a heightened awareness among readers. As AI continues to evolve, so too must our strategies for identifying and combating the sophisticated deceptions of digital masquerades. The battle against AI-generated misinformation is not just about technology; it's about safeguarding the very essence of truth in our increasingly digital world.

About the Authors:

Anthony Eastin a former Psychological Operations Officer for the US Air Force who specialized in offensive and defensive information operations. After the military, he worked for Meta's Global Operations team where he would investigate and create mitigating strategies against influence operations, fraud operations, election risks, and child safety. With over a decade of experience in identifying diversified complex threats, he aims to provide creative solutions through a data driven approach. He holds a Masters of Science in international security and intelligence studies from Bellevue University , a Masters in Strategic Public Relations from The George Washington University, and an MBA from the University of California, Davis - Graduate School of Management.

Sandeep Abraham, CAMS a candidate for Stanford University Ford Dorsey Master of International Policy, specializing in Cyber Policy and Security. Before that, he used to investigate election risks, global crisis, fraud, and financial crime for Meta, StubHub, and eBay, and was an intelligence analyst in the US Army and National Security Agency. He’s working on the “Trust” in Trust & Safety, focused on combatting fraud and disinformation, improving privacy, and increasing corporate transparency.