One thing becomes apparent to me whenever I open Facebook: many well-known news outlets and websites have become extremely sloppy. Their post captions contain serious spelling mistakes. That does not necessarily point to an AI problem; we will get to the AI problem later. It shows that social media editors not only lack basic spelling and grammar skills, but do not even bother to check their texts before posting them.
Now let’s get to the use of AI.
It is everywhere. Even editors who were once known for writing good articles are now using AI, and the vast majority of the public is unaware of it. In addition to the AI-generated summaries they use, the articles themselves are often at least polished by AI. That immediately means that it is no longer necessary to be able to write in order to become a reporter. You can simply let AI do the work for you.
Of course, the reality is that Greek local and national news outlets often publish articles that say almost nothing. Some of them are barely 50 words long. But that is another quality issue.
There are many websites that claim to estimate the probability that a text was produced by AI. Some of those websites are scams. No matter what you give them, the result is always “human.” That is extremely funny. What is not funny, though, is that people who have done no research use them as references.
I have, of course, tested a dozen such websites using my own texts, AI-generated texts, texts I have polished, and so on. That is how I assess how accurate each website is: through many tests of my own. Yes, these systems are not completely accurate; however, some have been at least 98% accurate in my own testing.
Another AI-related problem is the way various paid software tools create short-form videos for Facebook. The titles and descriptions they produce do not make sense in Greek, and yet popular talent shows seem to use such systems. It is just more automated slop from systems that are sold despite being inadequate for the Greek language, with no human supervision of their output.
We have entered an era in which grammatical and spelling mistakes are no longer treated as a big deal. I fear that, if society does not treat them as important, we are setting a very bad example for the next generation. How will we write thirty years from now?
The final boss of the Greek internet landscape is advertising. Not ordinary advertising, but intrusive advertising. If you open one of these websites on a mobile phone, you may struggle for five minutes to close all the videos that start playing. Ads flood the page and constantly change its width and height. It feels as though we are back in the 2000s, fighting pop-ups and spyware again. At least these ads are not installing spyware, but the symphony of flying advertisements makes the article disappear and renders it completely unreadable. The only way to read such websites is to use Brave or another similar browser.
“What do you expect from cheap sites that rely on clicks and low-quality content?” you may ask.
Not much, really. But the tragedy is that even more established websites have gone over to the dark side. Some outlets that once built their reputation on sharp, original and genuinely valuable content now have websites that are difficult to navigate and unpleasant to read because of intrusive advertising.
Recently, a local Corfiot news outlet that I do not want to name went all-in on intrusive advertising. It flooded its pages with ads and is now also using AI. I understand that these reporters need to survive. But is this really the solution?