Chatbots posing as journalists have been running almost 50 AI-generated “content farms”, according to an investigation by the anti-misinformation tracker NewsGuard.

The concerned websites provide information on politics, health, environment, money, and technology at a “high volume” in order to give a quick turnover of material to saturate with advertisements for profit, according to the investigation, reports The Guardian.

“Some publish hundreds of articles a day,” Newsguard’s McKenzie Sadeghi and Lorenzo Arvanitis said. “Some of the content advances false narratives. Nearly all of the content features bland language and repetitive phrases, hallmarks of artificial intelligence.”

In all, 49 webpages in seven languages — English, Chinese, Czech, French, Portuguese, Tagalog, and Thai — have been identified as being "entirely or mostly" created by AI language models. Almost half of the sites had no obvious evidence of ownership or control, and only four could be contacted, said the report.

One such site, Famadillo.com, claimed to have an “expert” to use AI to edit old articles that nobody read anymore, while GetIntoKnowledge.com acknowledged utilizing "automation at some points where they are extremely needed."

Searching for typical error messages produced by services such as ChatGPT led to the discovery of AI-generated content. “All 49 sites identified by NewsGuard had published at least one article containing error messages commonly found in AI-generated texts, such as ‘my cutoff date in September 2021’, ‘as an AI language model’ and ‘I cannot complete this prompt’, among others,” the report also said.

While the sites share AI authorship, their levels of success vary: ScoopEarth.com, has 124,000 Facebook followers for its celebrity biographies, while others, such as the finance site FilthyLucre.com, have not attracted a single follower on any platform.