NewsBreak, a free app with roots in China that is the most downloaded news app in the U.S., was found publishing erroneous stories with the use of AI.
Billing itself as "the go-to source for all things local," Newsbreak says it has over 50 million monthly users., a free app with roots in China that is the most downloaded news app in the United States, published an alarming piece about a small town shooting. It was headlined "Christmas Day Tragedy Strikes Bridgeton, New Jersey Amid Rising Gun Violence in Small Towns.
Reuters spoke to seven former NewsBreak employees, including five who said most of the engineering work behind the app's algorithm is carried out in its China-based offices. The former employees requested anonymity, citing confidentiality agreements with NewsBreak. Without providing a reason to Reuters, NewsBreak added a disclaimer to its homepage in early March, warning that its content "may not always be error-free".
"I cannot think of a faster way to destroy the NewsBreak brand," Norm Pearlstine, former Executive Editor at the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times who was working at the time as a consultant to NewsBreak, wrote in the memo to Zheng. NewsBreak said the news stories referenced in Pearlstine's memo were a "limited experiment in three U.S. counties" to aggregate third-party content, and that the effort was disbanded after producing ten articles. The company denied going behind paywalls and said it used "snippets" of articles that were publicly visible to produce complete news stories using OpenAI.
Another copyright lawsuit is ongoing. The two parties are "embroiled in additional lawsuits which we are vigorously defending against," NewsBreak said. A NewsBreak spokesperson said there was no ongoing commercial relationship with Yidian. Yidian, Phoenix New Media and Li Ya did not respond to requests from Reuters for comment.
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