Jiangxi MCN Agency Under Investigation for AI-Generated Rumors
TapTechNews June 14th news, according to the report of CCTV yesterday, in January of this year, a message of "an explosion occurred in Xi'an" appeared on a network platform, with key information such as time and place and accompanying pictures fully available, extremely confusing. After the police investigation, the account that released the message belonged to an MCN agency in Jiangxi.
TapTechNews note: MCN refers to "multi-channel network", which is any entity or organization that cooperates with content creators or directly produces content, and performs business and marketing functions on the network platform where the content is published.
The actual controller of this company is Wang. According to Li Yi, the captain of the Network Security Guard Brigade of the High-tech Branch of the Nanchang Municipal Public Security Bureau, the "explosion" news above was verified as not having occurred, and it was preliminarily determined that several pieces of information released by this MCN agency were suspected of network rumor-mongering.
The police immediately interviewed the person in charge of the company and at the same time inspected the office premises of the company and took on-site evidence of the computers and software tools used.
Upon verification, the above rumors, from text to pictures were all generated by AI. Wang got keywords through a domestic website - which specifically provides "news reports that may generate hot spots in the near future" or "types of things that are happening or about to happen", and classifies and grades the keywords for writers. Wang generated keywords through this website and formed the title of the article.
Wang then used an AI software with voice interaction function to speak the keywords, and then the software automatically grabbed relevant information from the Internet to generate texts of hundreds to thousands of words, and accompanied by false pictures that "seemingly related to the event", thus forming seemingly a lot of information, but actually non-existent content.
Then, Wang used another software to automatically upload the AI-generated content to different accounts controlled by the MCN agency on multiple network platforms and released it publicly, basically without the need for human participation throughout. Therefore, such rumor information was generated during the operation. This MCN agency generated a large number of articles in a short period of time, reaching a peak of 4000 to 7000 articles per day.
The police found during the investigation that the content released by the MCN agency on the Internet mainly focuses on livelihood information, and by adding exaggerated story plots or novelty elements, or fabricating false information to obtain the attention and number of likes from netizens, and then realizing traffic monetization. Through this way, Wang obtained high rewards in a short period of time. According to the preliminary estimation of the police, the income of this agency is more than 10,000 yuan per day.
After investigation, Jiangxi man Wang has operated 5 MCN agencies and a total of 842 self-media accounts. He has long organized the company's personnel to select hot articles and used artificial intelligence tools to batch generate false articles for attracting fans and diverting traffic. Currently, the Nanchang public security organ in Jiangxi has imposed administrative detention on Wang for 5 days and ordered the involved MCN agency to suspend business for rectification.