Fake books. Made-up sources. Bogus trampoline bunnies. We’re all getting a lot of AI-generated content in our feeds these days. But a new working paper suggests there’s a silver lining for trusted news organizations: they may be able to benefit from the broader degradation of the information ecosystem and win over subscribers concerned about sifting through the slop on their own.
Filipe Campante, Bloomberg distinguished professor at Johns Hopkins University, was reading coverage about deep fakes and fake news in the lead-up to the election last year when he conceived of this field experiment.
“My economist brain said: If something — let’s say trustworthiness — becomes really scarce, then it becomes very valuable,” Campante said. He wondered whether “being confronted with the difficulty of telling real from fake would actually make people more willing to pay for news that they trust.”
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