Screenshots from South Florida Standard via Internet Archive.
The “South Florida Standard” was, until recently, a website offering regularly updated local news stories in the Sunshine State, covering topics ranging from politics, economics, sports, tourism, environmental issues, and tech. It was also, according to a report byThe Florida Trib, merely a “digital mirage masquerading as local news,” with AI-generated reporters and stolen content.
Trib reporterKate Paynereported on Thursday how the site, now offline but partially preserved on theInternetArchive, featured work it claimed was by “local journalists,” but who were actually “creations of artificial intelligence – complete with fake headshots and made-up biographies peppered with South Florida cliches, their bylines plastered on articles that were lifted from actual news outlets, recycled through AI and republished.”
For example, “Sofia Delgado,” who was identified as the editor-in-chief of the South Florida Standard, had a bio that described her as a bilingual mother of two who was raised in Hialeah and a pleasantly smiling profile photo (the woman in the far left of the image at the top of this article).
But Sofia Delgado, reporter, editor-in-chief, and happy Hialeah mom, does not exist.
Virtually none of the reporters listed on the site did, including the other two photos above, business and real estate reporter “Grant Hollister” (middle photo) or sports reporter “DJ Lattimore.” Searching for any online record of these “reporters” finds a scattering of online profiles with copy-and-pasted bios across a variety of social media platforms but no posts, updates, or proof of any actual human life behind the stock-photo-esque images.
When Trib reporters began investigating the South Florida Standard, they soon noticed that the site administrators “began tinkering with its contents and removing staff bios – before taking the site offline entirely,” wrote Payne.
“A digital mirage masquerading as local news, the South Florida Standard underscores just how easy it has become to corrupt one of the country’s core institutions: independent journalism,” she continued. “At a time when trust in the media has eroded to a historic low, sham news sites like this one are increasingly common in Florida and across the country, a dangerous development for American democracy, experts told The Florida Trib,” and it “also shows how easy it is for the real people behind these digital doppelgangers to remain in the shadows – evidence of the staggering capabilities of AI and the threat it can pose to an unsuspecting public in a damaged democracy.”
“Much of the content published by the South Florida Standard appears to have been lifted fromFlorida Politics, a website run by publisherPeter Schorsch, whose coverage has become a must-read for many political insiders and journalists,” Payne noted, and she reached out to Schorsch for his take:
In an email, Schorsch said the Standard is one of a number of sites he’s aware of that are “plAIgiarising” his content. AI bots pose a “definite threat” to his outlet, Schorsch said, because they scrape so much content at once that they can temporarily overwhelm his website and block his readers’ access.
Source: Drudge Report
