Time to set boundaries?
Imagine spending countless hours sitting through local government meetings, taking notes and photos, researching, fact checking, attempting to follow-up with officials and citizens, taking pictures of sites, and writing and publishing articles to let people know what’s happening in the community.
Then someone and/or an AI bot scrapes your work, inaccurately rewords what you said, and publishes it on their website as if you wrote false statements.
Some Generative AI bots are working hard to scrape text, images, video, etc. from the internet and rapidly summarize it for unsuspecting users and/or profiteers. Names of elected officials, roads, city boards, and details are changed in the process and ultimately, no one will actually know who made critical decisions, where things are actually happening, and or other important details. For instance, we published an article, “Work continues on developments off County Line Road” last night. A few hours later, the article and photos were scraped from NewBernNow.com, re-worded with nonsensical statements that were said to be written by the editor and published on a so-called news website.
If you happen to come across the inaccurately reproduced article, that falsely claimed the editor wrote that one of New Bern alderman’s name is “Barbara Finest,” County Line Road and Catfish Lake Road are highways, the city’s Department Review Committee is an “Improvement Evaluate Committee,” single-family lots are “single-family tons;” videos of local government meetings are “movies,” the letter of agreement is a “settlement of agreement,” “ship an email” to the editor, and other things, please disregard it.
We asked the website to take the article down and it appears that they have. The site will not be named at this time to prevent amplification.