B&H Photo Published an AI-Generated Guide Written by a Fake Person
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Re: B&H Photo Published an AI-Generated Guide Written by a Fake Person
#2> When reached for comment, a B&H representative claimed the company’s policy was not to use AI-generated content and that it would “investigate this matter with our content teams.” Shortly thereafter, the article and profile were deleted. But for a month, the story remained online and positioned itself as an expert guide written by a real person and visitors to the blog would have been none the wiser.
Seems like a slight non-story to me: a parsimonious explanation here is that a staff (or contract) editor was given an assignment, and chose to fabricate it instead.
(A more interesting tidbit about B&H: their sales tax hijinks are legendary[1], and significantly predate Amazon's.)
[1]: https://www.dpreview.com/news/4007164682/bh-photo-accused-of...
Re: B&H Photo Published an AI-Generated Guide Written by a Fake Person
#3> When reached for comment, a B&H representative claimed the company’s policy was not to use AI-generated content and that it would “investigate this matter with our content teams.” Shortly thereafter, the article and profile were deleted. But for a month, the story remained online and positioned itself as an expert guide written by a real person and visitors to the blog would have been none the wiser. Seems like a s…
At first, I figured that's the explanation, but you're ignoring a more puzzling statement in the article:
> To explain how an AI-generated story written by an AI-generated person was published despite this policy, B&H says it was part of a “test” to identify and protect against such content.
> “Our editors wrote a test article in mid-November as part of their efforts to identify and protect against AI-generated content. They overlooked adding disclosure to the article indicating that it was AI-generated, which was a mistake, and did not delete the article after the test.”
This sounds... rather unconvincing.
Re: B&H Photo Published an AI-Generated Guide Written by a Fake Person
#4> When reached for comment, a B&H representative claimed the company’s policy was not to use AI-generated content and that it would “investigate this matter with our content teams.” Shortly thereafter, the article and profile were deleted. But for a month, the story remained online and positioned itself as an expert guide written by a real person and visitors to the blog would have been none the wiser. Seems like a s…
At first, I figured that's the explanation, but you're ignoring a more puzzling statement in the article: > To explain how an AI-generated story written by an AI-generated person was published despite this policy, B&H says it was part of a “test” to identify and protect against such content. > “Our editors wrote a test article in mid-November as part of their efforts to identify and protect against AI-generated conte…
Yeah, that's pretty suspicious; I missed that.
Re: B&H Photo Published an AI-Generated Guide Written by a Fake Person
#5> When reached for comment, a B&H representative claimed the company’s policy was not to use AI-generated content and that it would “investigate this matter with our content teams.” Shortly thereafter, the article and profile were deleted. But for a month, the story remained online and positioned itself as an expert guide written by a real person and visitors to the blog would have been none the wiser. Seems like a s…
> …a parsimonious explanation here is that a staff (or contract) editor was given an assignment, and chose to fabricate it instead.
The fabricated author biography and photo suggest that it's not just an "oopsie!", especially considering that they also said, "We typically do not create a writer profile unless we use someone more than occasionally". B&H understood what they were doing.
Re: B&H Photo Published an AI-Generated Guide Written by a Fake Person
#6Note that it was a single article, B&H claims it was an accident and they deleted it since then.
> “Our editors wrote a test article in mid-November as part of their efforts to identify and protect against AI-generated content. They overlooked adding disclosure to the article indicating that it was AI-generated, which was a mistake, and did not delete the article after the test.”
Re: B&H Photo Published an AI-Generated Guide Written by a Fake Person
#7Assuming good intent...
If you were testing that a 3rd party detector could protect the system from an insider (writers submitting ai generated articles), you would create a profile.
Since it is the holidays, it's _really_ easy to forget something, particularly when services have "freeze" dates when no further changes to production systems are allowed.
Re: B&H Photo Published an AI-Generated Guide Written by a Fake Person
#8>Multiple companies have toyed with the idea of using AI to generate stories, all of whom have been widely panned for the decision. G/O Media (which operates Gizmodo and Kotaku) attempted it earlier this year, the result of which was error-riddled pieces and widespread pushback from its staff. The company plans to move forward with AI authors despite this. Gannett, which operates USA Today, also attempted it but pulled back after it resulted in “botched” coverage of high school sports. More recently, Sports Illustrated was accused of the practice, a decision that resulted in widespread derision and the firing of its CEO.
all that matters is attracting $USER to $PLATFORM at a rate which minimizes $COST_OF_CONTENT_PRODUCTION to a point where it is below $INCOME_PER_USER. none of these "news outlets" have any integrity, they might back off of AI but they've already demonstrated that they'll publish anything that drives viewership. This also calls into question the legitimacy of human-written content published by these "news outlets" because whatever ideals journalism may have aspired to in the past no longer exist (if they ever even existed in the past).
Re: B&H Photo Published an AI-Generated Guide Written by a Fake Person
#9> When reached for comment, a B&H representative claimed the company’s policy was not to use AI-generated content and that it would “investigate this matter with our content teams.” Shortly thereafter, the article and profile were deleted. But for a month, the story remained online and positioned itself as an expert guide written by a real person and visitors to the blog would have been none the wiser. Seems like a s…
Regarding the sales tax “hijinks”, B&H actually won that lawsuit because the judge agreed that the law did not require them to pay sales tax on those payments as the NY AG claimed. It’s not hijinks if they are interpreting the law more correctly than the government.
Re: B&H Photo Published an AI-Generated Guide Written by a Fake Person
#10It is not about B&H but how [Google] SEO works: you can write the best posts and will be hiddent in the long long tail even if they have specific content within a known audience.
Internet Search is broken.