Baseball fans are facing an onslaught of phony content created with artificial intelligence on Facebook, pushed by a clickbait network in Southeast Asia capitalizing on interest in the lead-up to the World Series, an AFP-Jiji investigation has found.
With names like "Dodgers Dynasty" and "Yankee Nation," the pages mimic genuine fan accounts, but link to websites that are full of ads and phony AI-generated articles meant to draw clicks — and payouts for the site creators.
"The goal of pages and operations like this is to earn money, and so whatever is going to work in terms of messaging, in terms of content, in terms of tactics they will do," said journalist Craig Silverman, who has investigated similar clickbait.
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