By Gordon Young
Technically, the Michigan Times still exists, but it’s probably not what you think it is.
When the University of Michigan – Flint student newspaper let its domain name lapse last year, it was a clear sign that the Michigan Times was in trouble. The publication that covered the downtown campus for more than 60 years is now officially “sunsetting” and will shut down completely at the end of the academic year, a victim of declining student interest and, some argue, university budget cuts.
The domain “themichigantimes.com” was quickly purchased by another entity, and a new publication with the same name soon appeared online pledging to cover “all types of local news for the cities of Flint and Detroit in Michigan.” It resembles a slickly produced version of the old student newspaper site, albeit one that is heavy on regional and state news.
It still claims a strong connection to the university and describes the staff as a “team of young people, consisting of University of Michigan-Flint grads.” Another page identifies them as “former University of Michigan-Flint students” who “are committed to helping current students and being the place where their problems will be heard.“
But with almost no campus coverage, readers might be left wondering: what exactly is this thing?
University officials confirm it is definitely not a student newspaper and has no connection to UM-Flint. It also appears to be misrepresenting its ties to alumni.
What it does have are many of the characteristics of an automated site that pulls stories from legitimate news sources; quickly scrambles and rewrites them using artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots; and publishes them under a different byline. In the process, it generates programmatic advertising revenue. Such robo-sites are a cheap and easy way to repurpose the work of journalists to turn a profit, and they are proliferating online.
“It is unclear how to describe this new practice, including whether articles rewritten using AI constitute ‘original content’,” write Jack Brewster, Macrina Wang and Coalter Palmer in a 2023 investigation by NewsGuard, a company that tracks online misinformation. “At best, it could be called ‘efficient aggregation.’ At worst, it might be seen as ‘turbocharged plagiarism.’ Whatever it is called – and courts are likely ultimately to decide — never before have sites had the ability to rewrite articles created by others virtually in real time, and in a manner that can often be difficult to detect.”
Brewster details just how simple it is to get an AI generated site up and running in a recent Wall Street Journal story. He easily hired a developer to build a site dedicated to a U.S. Senate race in Ohio for about $100. In two days it was capable of churning out thousands of articles with very precise parameters, along with headlines, photos and eye-pleasing graphics. He likened the process to ordering a meal on Uber Eats.
The new Michigan Times site promises to “strive to be the voice of the locals,” but it’s tough to figure out just who is trying to give residents a platform. Despite claiming to be UM-Flint graduates, there is no record of anyone with the same name as three of the staff members in the masthead — including the top editor — ever attending or graduating from the university, according to Robert King, director of Marketing and Communications at UM-Flint.
One of the names does match the name of a student who completed some coursework in the early nineties and another matches a student who graduated from UM-Flint in 2015, according to King. But it’s unclear if those former students are the same people listed in the Michigan Times masthead, and staffers of the student newspaper from those times were unfamiliar with the names.
The site’s IP address — the unique identifying number assigned to every device connected to the internet — is hidden behind a service which prevents malicious users from attacking and shutting down the site. It’s an increasingly common practice, but the security measure also means you can’t identify the server hosting the website, which could reveal the owner.
Likewise, the domain name registration is private, with no ownership information available. All contact information refers back to “Domains By Proxy,” a service that masks personal contact information. Many domains are private; it is often the default setting at registration. But many news organizations, such as the New York Times and National Public Radio (NPR), do not anonymize their domain information in the interest of transparency.
Attempts to clarify these discrepancies with the publication — or verify if any of the listed staff members actually exist — were unsuccessful. There is no phone number listed, and there was no response to more than a dozen requests sent to the only contact email on the site. There are no comment options on stories to offer feedback or ask questions. There are no X, Facebook, Instagram or other social media accounts linked to the site. This lack of information is rare for news organizations, which typically work to make interaction with the public as easy as possible.
Unusually, there are also no credits for any of the images on the site. The stories are a mix of copied and rewritten press releases and variations of stories that first appeared on other news sites without credit to the original author or publication. Instead, all stories carry the byline of a listed Michigan Times staffer.
A February 28 article by James Hamilton in the Michigan Times on the death of controversial Flint City Councilman Eric Mays, for example, closely mirrors the content of a story that ran two days earlier by Steve Carmody, a reporter for Michigan Public, the NPR affiliate in Ann Arbor. While the wording is slightly different, the sources, quotations, and information are identical. There is no new reporting in the Times version, which even links back to Carmody’s story in a quotation from Mays’ lawyer.
Vincent Duffy, the news director at Michigan Public, said he has dealt with numerous online publications who lift stories without permission. Typically, he simply contacts them and asks them to remove the unauthorized material.
“This is the first time we’ve run into something where there’s not even anyone to contact to say, ‘hey cut it out,’” he said. “All media outlets, especially local, are facing challenging economic times. It doesn’t help us if other people steal our content and claim it as their own.”
A story on a Detroit police captain who was suspended after allegedly choking his wife follows a similar pattern. Steve Neavling broke the story on the morning of January 12 in Detroit Metro Times. Later that day, the Michigan Times ran what appears to be a rewritten version of the story by Madison Hicks with no new information. (This time the article did attribute a single quote to Neavling’s reporting and link back to his original article.) Neavling checked in with his key sources for the story and none had been contacted by the Michigan Times.
“The frustrating part is that I did the original reporting, and then out of nowhere this poorly written story appears without anything new,” said Neavling, a veteran investigative reporter who previously worked for the Detroit Free Press and Motor City Muckraker. “It’s such a difficult time in journalism right now. People are losing trust, and now you have these AI generated stories that are going to erode trust even further. That really concerns me.”
Naeveling points out that there’s a disclaimer on the Michigan Times site that is highly problematic for any news organization striving to project trustworthiness. But it just may be the most clear-cut content on the site:
“The Michigan Times does not make any warranties about the completeness, reliability and accuracy of this information. Any action you take upon the information you find on this website…is strictly at your own risk.”
Gordon Young is a San Francisco-based journalist who grew up in Flint. He is the author of Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City, a book about the past, present, and future of Vehicle City.
Editor’s Note: An extended version of this story will run in East Village Magazine’s May 2024 issue, out May 10.
