A "popular" new Papergreat post will get maybe 20 pageviews in its first 24 hours. This blog isn't exactly a buzzing hub of internet activity. So it was to my great surprise last month when I discovered that the quick and silly post Ingredients list found in the parking lot of a Circle K in Florence had thousands of pageviews during its first day. It has now accumulated about 18,400 pageviews.
All of this is because the post was chosen for aggregation by an AI-powered "news" site called Newsbreak, which gathers others' reporting on community news and puts it together in one stream for local readers.
I imagine that the "found in the parking lot of a Circle K in Florence" portion of the post title is what caught the "eye" of the AI. Because a human being with journalism training would never have selected such a post to aggregate as "breaking news." So let that part be yet another lesson regarding the deep limitations of AI.
At least Newsbreak states up front: "It’s essential to note our commitment to transparency: Our Terms of Use acknowledge that our services may not always be error-free, and our Community Standards emphasize our discretion in enforcing policies. As a platform hosting over 100,000 pieces of content published daily, we cannot pre-vet content, but we strive to foster a dynamic environment for free expression and robust discourse through safety guardrails of human and AI moderation."
I'm not sure how many people read that note, though. Newsbreak's readers questioned why it was aggregating an incredibly nonessential post from Papergreat. Some of their comments:
- Why is this news worthy?
- how is this news
- lmao why is this in the news?
- lmfao I cannot believe this made the news!
- Well this source is getting blocked
- why in the f**k is this a news article
- Why is this even a post.
- slow day huh
- why is this news and why did someone actually take the time
- This is news worthy because of what??? I’ll wait for a reasonable answer
Clearly, some of them still don't understand this is what you're going to get when you remove humans from the equation and let a bunch of code try to figure out what's "newsworthy." It just so dumb that we're trying to have AI reinvent a wheel that wasn't broken.
Thomas Baekdal asked in 2024, "Why do news aggregator apps keep failing?" and found that the initial answer is quite simple:
"We already have all the news aggregators we need. ... Every single national and local newspaper is a news aggregator. It's a publication where the journalists look at millions of different things that have happened in the world over the past 24 hours, and then they have picked out (aggregated) the news stories that they feel you need to see. ... So, newspapers are news aggregators. Which also means that all the news aggregators are just aggregating other news aggregators... and that just doesn't make much sense, neither in terms of audience or business model. ... For some strange reason, many tech entrepreneurs never realized this."
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For what it's worth, all of the interest generated did get some folks to comment on the blog post (not the Newsbreak post) with ideas regarding what all the ingredients were for.
Guesses ranged from "some sort of sweet and spicy marinara sauce using honey" to pork roast with hot honey drizzle to pizza to pork barbecue. It's not clear whether they might have asked an AI chatbot to generate those guesses...