Web of lies on our screens

When a message from a friend popped up in our WhatsApp group, we all had a good laugh. It was a screenshot of a Facebook page that screamed Kerala singer G Venugopal was no more. The mirth was because the person who forwarded the message was Venugopal himself.

Despite the viciousness of the Facebook post, the singer was more amused than angry, and all the conversations it generated were gentle ribbings and cheeky responses. However, a look at the Facebook page itself was a bit alarming.

Some of Venugopal’s fans had called out the bluff immediately and posted messages on the same Facebook page saying this news was not true. Still, several people were paying homage to the “departed” soul and leaving digital flowers as their mark of respect. Days later, some of us were getting queries from people across the world asking about the news.

Though the overwhelming reaction to the post was condemnation, the hope of stopping such fraudulent posts is remote as the “attention economy” can be financially rewarding.

A check on the fake news page showed that it had garnered over 2,000 reactions, almost 600 comments, and over 100 shares. While the Facebook post alone would not have brought any monetary gain for the creator, there is a high chance that many of the people who visited the page clicked on the provided link.

This traffic generation is key to such activities: attracting more eyeballs to Facebook pages and then luring some of them to platforms like their websites and YouTube channels, where high traffic is financially rewarding.

The effort to attract more viewers at any cost leads to desperate and sometimes mind-boggling methods. Reports of a Kerala youth turning his car into a swimming pool and YouTubers staging prank kidnappings of children in Andhra and Telangana are examples of this mad rush for viewership.

Stunts while driving cars, riding bikes, and even leaping from one high-rise building to another have commanded high viewership. In the quest for this holy grail, some have paid with their lives.

While daredevils risk their limbs and lives to post videos that attract fans, thousands of others focus on the “more hits-more income” principle that underpins internet ad revenue to create models that bring them money. The arrival of AI has made their job easier.

In February 2024, The Wired magazine ran a revealing article on a Serbian DJ and musician who runs over 2,000 websites that publish AI-generated content. Nebojsa Vujinovic Vujo buys domains of popular websites that have ceased to exist, reactivates them, and fills them with stories written by AI.

He’s the CEO of the digital marketing firm Shantel, which monetizes its AI-populated sites through programmatic ads, sponsored content, and selling the placement of ‘backlinks’ to website owners trying to boost their credibility with search engines, says the report.

Now he owns domain names of former Vatican site popetoyou, the popular Hong Kong newspaper Apple Daily which was shut down by the local government, and Trumpplaza.com. Vujo says he used to employ dozens of people to write materials for his sites, but after tools like ChatGPT became accessible, he has reduced the number of employees to a handful.

Polarisation brought about in societies by politics is providing a fertile area for such content creators. Realising the danger, platforms like Facebook have taken action to curb such posts if they are fake news about political leaders. However, that has not deterred many.

Fake political content creators in the US, like Christopher Blair, who admits making 15,000 dollars every month through his made-up stories (which he tags as satire), have switched tack and started posting on culture wars that are drowning the internet in that country.

Even they are facing competition as websites that use AI to generate content are mushrooming. Newsguard, a US company that monitors fakes online, has identified almost 1,000 AI-generated sites that spew falsehoods and nonsensical material every day.

As the reach of the internet is not limited by international borders, the world is an oyster for many of these operators. The appearance of Shrimp Jesus and other bizarre images on Facebook is not limited to one country. Even political and religious debates in some countries are being exploited as money-making avenues by people elsewhere.

The New York Times mentions SpaceXmania, run by a creator based in Pakistan, as an example of this. It cannibalises material put out by people like Blair and turns them into blogs that are read by hundreds of thousands, earning its owner a hefty sum.

Several reports have indicated that many of the cybercrime operations that operate globally – such as fraudulent crypto investment, dubious loans, and love scams – are based in countries like Cambodia.

They often recruit local people to woo victims with promises of quick money. Kerala police say 50 such agents are suspected to be operating on the social media scene in the state.

While criminals have been taking advantage of the internet for a long time, the ease of generating text and pictures is paving the way for more subtle ways to rig the game, especially in sectors like the stock market.

Two years ago, Harvard scholars and cybersecurity experts Sandeep Abraham and Tony Eastin published a report on the fake news website phenomenon after they went down the rabbit hole upon discovering a little-known Iowa newspaper publishing a torrent of financial stories. In the report, they discovered a chain of links aimed at boosting shares of certain companies.

The arrival of large language models has been a blessing to such manipulators as they can churn out hundreds of stories with minimal effort, eliminating the need to hire actual people to generate content.

Some of these operators are so sloppy that they don’t even bother to remove sentences which the AI tools add, stating that these reports are generated by AI and may contain unreliable information.

With the rise of AI, the internet is becoming overwhelmed, The Verge reported last year. AI platforms produce an abundance of text and images, and soon music and video as well. Their output has the potential to overrun or outcompete the platforms we rely on for news, information, and entertainment, it said.

Often, what we read about what is happening in other countries sounds distant and unrelated to us, as our realities differ vastly from theirs. But the internet is a different game in many ways. What happens in a distant land unfolds right in front of us far sooner than we anticipate.

A very basic search about the creator of the Facebook page that posted fake news about Venugopal’s death led us to some social media handles that have thousands of followers.

As tales of such easy money-making methods spread, we will inevitably start seeing more webs of lies appearing on our screens.

Eye in the sky to help road repair

Good roads remain elusive in India, and Kerala exemplifies this struggle with millions spent annually on maintenance, yet plagued by pothole-ridden nightmares. A recent study led by Dr. Anand Puppala and PhD candidate Amit Gajurel from Texas A&M University reveals that leveraging high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite data can effectively detect damages to roads and bridges. This innovation not only saves time on repairs and preventative measures but also holds potential to reduce road management costs, reportsTexas A&M Today.

Given Kerala’s current road conditions, many have concluded that heavenly intervention is the only way out of the mess. Perhaps relief is on the horizon with ISRO and Nasa set to launch their joint Nisar mission this year, offering free SAR data to monitor land and coastal changes. Could this data show our government a way to construct roads that survive more than a single rainy season?

Odisha startup targets air pollution

Air pollution remains a significant issue in nearly every Indian city due to rapid urbanization and increasing vehicular traffic. Odisha-based startup Aurassure, in collaboration with Google, has developed an IoT-enabled system to monitor local air quality using satellite data and analytical solutions. This innovation provides early weather warnings before conditions deteriorate. Founder Akansha Priyadarsini tells Your Story that Aurassure, established in 2022, now operates in over 150 cities across India. By its second year, the startup achieved a revenue of 5.4 crore rupees, highlighting its rapid growth and impact in tackling environmental challenges.

Jio plans high-speed internet

Reliance’s Jio Platforms has received government approval to launch a high-speed satellite-based internet service, reports India Today. Jio will collaborate with Luxembourg-based SES for this initiative. According to In-Space chairman Pawan Goenka, Inmarsat has also been approved. Waiting in line are Elon Musk’s Starlink and Amazon’s Kuiper. A study by Deloitte projects significant growth in India’s satellite broadband service market, anticipating a 36 percent annual increase over the next five years, with expectations to reach 1.9 billion US dollars by 2030.

At last, an intelligent politician

Finally, an election candidate who actually listens and answers all your questions! British voters in Brighton Pavilion are being charmed by AI Steve, a constantly evolving digital candidate shaped by local feedback. British entrepreneur Steve Endacott promises to be the human face of AI Steve if elected. He started this project out of sheer frustration with career politicians. Well, we understand that well, don’t we?