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If the video documentary on which I reported last week was slickly convincing at first glance, with professional-level production values, this week’s focus of my attention is nothing like it. And I find myself writing a new article only two days after I sent off the last one, because the iron is hot.

I have Google news to send me a daily email summarizing any news about my favorite pop singer. (Hints: she’s Scotland’s best voice ever, has been active in music since the late 1970s, and has also been a very influential philanthropist in issues of women’s rights and poverty for some decades as well. Much to adore as well as to admire).

Today’s email alert included a link to a news website which I had not heard of. The brief article there had a date of now, but described as current news a charity concert in which the above singer took part… December 2019, old news. It was also filled with the kind of mistakes which led me to believe it was written by an AI. Either that, or it was a bad machine translation from another language into English.

I dug further into the site. Every part of it revealed similar errors, a common style of language throughout. “About”, “The Team”, the several categories of news being reported on: all were in this junky English which left me scratching my head. Who is the intended audience for this rubbish? It could never fool anyone with about a grade 5 level of the language and up. I’m not sure how non-native speakers or readers would take to it, though. What is the purpose of even setting up and filling or maintaining such an obviously fake news site? Other such sites seem to aim to fool the reader by appearing genuine, using reasonable quality language which doesn’t put the reader off. This one? Nothing that sophisticated.

Anything I read there made me feel cheap, dirty, sullied; not because it was about disgusting things, but simply because it was so poorly written. I googled the name of the site, which I will not dignify by revealing here. There is only one page describing it, listing an age of just over 6 months, a value of $8.95, and a daily income of $0.15. Perhaps it’s too new for the sites which blow the whistle on fake news to have discovered yet? Or simply too obviously wrong for anyone to bother pointing it out as such?

Is it something entirely set up and written, straying here into science fiction territory, by AI? WHY? Computer programs are being developed which can now write, draw, paint, and compose music in various styles. To varying degrees of success, true; but this site I would characterize as being such a failure that I cannot conceive of it as an attempt to fool, as I have written, anyone with a rudimentary grasp of native English. Is it simply meant to sow more confusion, or to distract people from what is actually important and worthy of attention? (It’s certainly having some effect on me: Look how much I’ve written about it already!)

Is this one of the future genres of internet news, with, say, the wittiest or best-written work at one end (The Economist’s picture captions, or articles in The Atlantic), more common but still quite readable human-produced stuff in the middle, the best of AI output after that, and this at the far other end? Its existence bothers me and makes me despair; but then I am someone who devours great English writing like great food, and despises or chokes on the worst of it. To the insult I feel has been added injury.

Simple execrable taste is no legal cause for forcing something like this to be shut down. It should either sink or swim by its own merits or lack thereof, so perhaps I can hope reasonably to see its extinction. (Is it intended to make money from click-through ads? At 15 cents a day, no one will be getting rich fast from this.) However, given the down-sliding state of things in the world that I perceive at the moment, perhaps such optimism is also unfounded. I suppose that only time can tell.

Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer and photographer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with nearly 2000 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/

He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri: www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti

By Tony Hanmer