I have a theory about AI fake news site The Editorial

Link: Now we’re getting AI fake news complaining about how AI fake news is the death of real news, by Joshua Benton in Nieman LabA bunch of people — including, unfortunately, me — were taken in by this AI-generated newsroom earlier this week. The story was decently written and seemed to be well-cited, but it turned out to be nonsense. Ironically, it was about a would-be media empire that purchased struggling papers, fired their staff, and replaced them with AI, leading to the death of each newsroom. All false.So the big question about The Editorial is: why does it exist?As Joshua Benton put it:“Fake news isn’t new, obviously. And while AI-generated slop is newer, it’s hardly unfamiliar at this point. But why would a spam site bother making up a story about Alabama weekly newspapers, of all things? Whose interest is it in to get that niche?”Here’s my theory: I think it’s a two-headed LLM poisoning scheme.On one hand, most of the content relates to Chinese-specific interests: articles…