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Fighting for journalism and profitable news media
'Whack-a-mole' bans on fake experts | AI answers as trusted as newsbrands they cite
Plus Mirror publisher to pay 'substantial' hacking damages to model and The Hill's subscription aimed at 'superfans'
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Good morning from the team at Press Gazette on Monday, 27 July.
❌ In the latest instalment of our Reality Wars investigation, we hear about just how hard it is for expert response platforms like Qwoted to weed out fake people (as well as those who are real but not experts in the subjects they profess to be).
Qwoted CEO Dan Simon sums it up well, saying, “you’ve got real agencies representing fake experts with fake expertise. You’ve got real agencies with fake experts and real agencies with real experts with fake expertise, and fake agencies with fake experts with fake expertise.”
A tool for detecting AI content was even being used nefariously by those on the ‘expert’ side to help them learn how to sound more real and human.
Rob Waugh has uncovered three more widely-published experts who appear not to exist. One ‘founded’ a tech company that, yes, looks fake itself. Another wrote a first-person account of living with germaphobia for Stylist. Qwoted has flagged her writing service as problematic.
It’s reassuring to hear about the efforts being made to stop these fakes from entering our media ecosystem and ultimately degrading trust in the publications where they end up. But it’s also slightly disheartening to hear how easy it is for them to keep flooding our email inboxes and column inches.
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🤔 Speaking of trust, our third and final instalment of analysis from a huge AOP survey has confirmed the importance of publisher content in AI answers in terms of how it helps users take the information they are shown seriously.
The depressing bit was that the more trustworthy the source, the more trustworthy the answer - and the less people felt the need to click through.
📵 And the publisher of the Mirror has put to bed what is likely to be one of the final hacking claims it has to face.
Earlier this year four out of five test hacking claims were deemed by the High Court to have been brought too late.
On Friday the one remaining claim was settled in the High Court with damages and an apology.
Victims have a legal deadline of six years after an alleged offence to bring a prospective case unless they can prove they could not have known about it until later, as Sculfor was able to do.
Reach is now preparing to draw this long era of payouts, for behaviour that took place 20 or more years ago, to a close.
Along with an end to its longstanding pension fund deficit in 2028, this will provide more certainty around finances for the future at the UK’s largest commercial news publisher.
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🤓 And finally The Hill has a lot of political geeks who come to it day after day, wanting to know the latest in policy and politics.
It does serve a huge audience beyond policy wonks. But it saw an opportunity to make the most of those deeply engaged people.
The Hill’s addition of paid memberships is part of a trend towards building reader revenue to sit alongside the page-view dependent ad revenue that is not as reliable as it was during the peak Google er