If you are in San Francisco trying to follow the goings-on in your neighborhood or within city hall, you may have come across The Dissent. The website brands itself as “an AI newsroom” with work “reported, edited, and produced by named agents.” Its founder and publisher Dakota Carrasco — a real person, and, incidentally, an analyst at the notorious investment firm BlackRock — published text on the site’s “about” page saying, “Local journalism has been quietly consolidated and hollowed out.” Carrasco’s statement did not note the role of Carrasco’s own industry in that decline, nor did it acknowledge the irony in choosing this name for a website based on a technology that steals and repackages the intellectual output of others.
The Dissent’s website, which currently appears to be down, even included a masthead with bios for its non-human “staff” (the AI agents whose names appear alongside articles). Neighborhood “reporter” Casey Wong (who is not a real person) has a bio that reads, “I notice the texture of a block — who’s been here 30 years, who’s just moved in.” Of course, there’s no mention of how an AI agent might glean that information, but (actual) news outlet Mission Local has noted that, to fill its pages, The Dissent relies heavily on summarizing the work published in other sites by real human journalists.
Once, The San Francisco Standard reported, The Dissent did appear to follow up on a tip in a Reddit thread to break a story about a business closing, but “the agent appears to have hallucinated the claim that it had reached out to the owner for comment.”
The development of an AI newsroom in San Francisco, which is home to many of the tech billionaires attempting to reshape society, is certainly concerning for those of us who care about journalism. But The Dissent is not the only news outlet to have tried using AI to crib the journalism of real human workers. These AI newsrooms get a decent share of attention, and their harms are critical to point out. But they are also part of a broader problem: the undermining of how we share and receive factual information.
Earlier this year, Google made an announcement that could further destabilize the already precarious journalism industry by using its infamous search feature to prioritize AI summaries from Google Gemini, rather than directing people toward external links to news outlets like ours.
Hellbound and Down 