Thousands of Detroit Lions fans are being lied to, and now some media outlets are believing it too, beware of the A.I. Slop
I honeslty didn't think there would be a reason to write a follow up piece to an A.I. themed artilce I wrote a few weeks ago, but I've learned so much since then and something big happened in the NFL world this week that shows both fans and media need to be very careful with […]
I honeslty didn't think there would be a reason to write a follow up piece to an A.I. themed artilce I wrote a few weeks ago, but I've learned so much since then and something big happened in the NFL world this week that shows both fans and media need to be very careful with the info they consume and aggregate.
Let's rewind a bit. A few weeks ago, I wrote an article about stuff like this that is blasting all over Facebook and tricking a ton of Lions fans into believing that it's real.
Look, this is an amazing story, right? A player is giving up his $12.9 million bonus to help homeless shelters. It's easy to believe because Aidan Hutchinson is a really good guy and does charity stuff. But this is not true. That didn't stop 487 people from commenting or 1.2 thousand people from sharing.
What I learned this week is that there is a term for this. It's called A.I. slop. It's just random content made up with the help of artificial intelligence in order to go viral. It's generally made by people outside of the country, where the dollars and cents that this type of content gets can go a little further than it would in America.
There are countless pages like this on Facebook, and they all have a large following. The page that this came from has 10 thousand people following it. That's 10 thousand people who are being fed fake stories every day, and you can see that thousands of them are believing it.
There are ways to tell that stuff is fake. The best way is simply to take a look at the web address of the article that is linked to this post. Tintinhthanh. online. I mean, come on, does that seem like a real website? Not exactly something that screams "we talk about sports for real."
One of the biggest issues that we're facing now is that some sports writers out there are seeing things like this and believing it and then aggregating it. This week, this quote from new Eagles tackle Kendell Lamm came out, where he told ESPN that the Miami Dolphins culture is not great.
The thing is that this quote can't be traced back to anything ESPN ever wrote or put on video, and it's because Lamm never said this. He took to his Instagram on Monday to let the world know that he never said this and doesn't know where it came from.
The reason he had to do this is that a ton of outlets with real credibility wrote articles about it, and the story blew up in Miami. Enough to get back to Lamm.
Our own Kyle Crabbs, who is also the host of LockedOn Dolphins, traced the quote back to an A.I. slop site with another weird name.
If you look to the right, you can see that this same outlet reported that the Lions traded Jameson Williams to the Dallas Cowboys. Something we obviously know is not real.
This type of stuff is only going to progress going forward, and it's probably going to be harder to tell as A.I. advances. As a reader, the biggest recommendation is to go with the sites and the beat writers that you know and trust.
If you see one of our names sourced in a report from someone you might not know, it's always safe to go to our socials and see if we actually reported that. I can't speak for every writer, but if you see something you're not sure of, feel free to ask me about it.
For the pictures, look at the jersey numbers, look at the background, and look at their faces. A.I. is good, but right now it's still not good enough to fully flesh things out. I mean, look at this one for example.
Why is Hutchinson riding a cab in his pads and uniform? Why is he wearing a jersey with a seven on it? Why are there three different cab drivers here? Why does one of them look like he's driving a cab in 70's Brooklyn?
Just keep your eyes peeled and be smart about what you see out there.
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