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Inside a network of AI-generated newsletters targeting “small town America” (www.niemanlab.org)

submitted 12 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

3 comments fedilink hide all child comments

It turns out Good Day Fort Collins is just one in a network of AI-generated newsletters operating in 355 cities and towns across the U.S. Not only do these hundreds of newsletters share the same exact seven testimonials, they also share the same branding, the same copy on their about pages, and the same stated mission: “to make local news more accessible and highlight extraordinary people in our community.”

You wouldn’t know any of that as a subscriber. Separate website domains and distinct newsletter names make it difficult to connect the dots. There is Good Day Rock Springs, Daily Bentonville, Today in Virginia Beach, and Pittsburgh Morning News, to name just a few. Nothing in the newsletter copy discloses that they are part of a national network or that the article curation and summary blurbs are generated using large language models (LLMs).

The newsletters do all name the same founder and editor: Matthew Henderson.

Henderson is a serial internet startup founder and software engineer whose past companies include the on-demand blog-writing service Scribble and the journalist email database Press Hunt. Good Daily is currently a one-man operation, Henderson says. Though AI use is not disclosed to Good Daily subscribers, in an interview Henderson didn’t shy away from the fact that each newsletter is produced using near full automation.

“Our goal is to use automation and technology everywhere we possibly can without sacrificing product quality for our readers,” he told me in an email, explaining that he built the back-end technology that outputs the hundreds of newsletter editions every day

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Time to find more tools to blacklist specific news sites.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 hours ago

After doing some cursory research, I've identified uBlacklist as a potential tool for curating your search results. I have seen some reassuring things about it. If anyone else has suggestions or comments, they are welcome.