In my day job, a project I’ve been working on for the last couple weeks across both Radio New Zealand and the Australian Associated Press is debunking a slew of “fake” NZ news sites on Facebook. Many of them specialise in taking legitimate work by NZ reporters and running it through AI, stealing other reporters’ work, adding fake AI-generated images or misleading video as they go. One such post included grotesquely using AI to animate a still photo of a dead teenage Mt Maunganui landslide victim.
This slop is everywhere on social media now – literally any time a news event happens, a horde of pages will serve up AI-generated garbage about it instantly, from Australian shark attacks to the arrest of Venezuelan leader Maduro to the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Now, smaller pages are spoofing nearly every car crash and weather event that makes the news in New Zealand with AI content.
I was pleased to see my reporting got a lot of attention this week and made appearances on RNZ’s Afternoons and Mediawatch programmes to talk about it some as well in my very un-Kiwi accent.
Here’s some of what I’ve been working on:
How fake NZ news pages are swamping Facebook with AI slop (RNZ)
RNZ Afternoons with Jesse Mulligan interview with yours truly (RNZ)
Mediawatch: AI feeds fake news flood (the segment starts about 23min, 30sec in)
Fake NZ news page flooding Facebook with AI images (AAP)
NZ ‘media outlet’ misrepresents news with AI images and video (AAP)
Facebook pages peddle AI images of NZ landslide disaster (AAP)
It is depressing – like a lot of people, I think, I’m recoiling more and more from social media and what once seemed to be “fun” diversions, as FB becomes overwhelmed by slop and algorithmic nonsense and loses all its usefulness, X, which I quit long ago, became a Nazi bar, and most other sites are either annoying or infuriating. I even got to say the word “enshittification” on national radio this past week, a phrase which really does seem to sum up the vibe in the room on the internet these days.
My advice is – don’t trust anything you see on social media without verifying it first, and legitimate journalists are still the best source of information out there, not your mates on Facebook. I don’t know if there’s an end in sight to this flood of misinformation that’s reached tsunami heights in the past six years or so, but the most important tool you have to fight against it is your own brain and credulity.
Nik Dirga 