Articles seemingly generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) have taken over Google news feeds; or at least that was the case this morning when it came to video games.
Journalist George Young who first noticed the articles on their feed this morning. The website “Game Is Hard” is the source of these articles and at a glance many of them appear off.
So I log into Google News this morning as I do most mornings and I am absolutely flooded with articles from a website I don't know called "Game is Hard". Reading the titles you'll notice something a bit strange /1 pic.twitter.com/BnAZ9beIei
— George Young ➡️Summer Game Fest (@vitagamergeorge) October 18, 2023
Titles are grammatically incorrect or nonsensical and every article is accompanied by an AI generated picture (usually of a guy wearing a VR headset or sitting at a computer.)
Articles range from the obviously weird “Who is the king gaming” and “What is the role of magical creatures like Blast-Ended Skrewts in the game?” to more sensible and seemingly informative such as “Is 16 GB RAM good?”.
But upon closer inspection, even this seemingly normal articles devolve into what appears to be AI generated irrelevancy and references sources without linking to them.
Despite the strangeness of the articles, it’s fair to be skeptical that maybe these are just poor quality? However looking deeper at one of the author pages, we see that “Tom Misch” has published over 170 articles today already (it’s 11:22 A.M. at the time of writing) and other alleged authors have similar numbers.
In response to George’s thread, Google responded and asked for answers as to how these results appeared en masse; George claimed they were only searching terms like “gaming”, “Xbox”, “Steam”, when the results appeared.
At the time of writing we weren’t able to recreate these results (however one “Game Is Hard” article did appear when searching “Gaming”) however it’s likely that Google has already adjusted the websites place in the algorithm.
While not much can seemingly be done to stop AI-generated news articles from flooding search results, Google can allegedly “derank” them.
It’s frustrating to see these articles game the system, but similar to AI-generated art, these articles will require human articles to train off of and with an ever-changing news cycle it seems unlikely that AI will replace journalists any time soon. But maybe I should learn to code, just in case.
This is Niche Gamer Tech. In this column, we regularly cover tech and things related to the tech industry.
