An AI-powered news site called BNN Breaking used generative AI to paraphrase articles and incorrectly paired a story about sexual misconduct allegations with a photo of innocent Irish broadcaster Dave Fanning, damaging his reputation.
BNN Breaking, a Hong Kong-based news site founded by Gurbaksh Chahal in 2022, used generative AI tools to automatically paraphrase articles from other news outlets and publish them at scale. The site employed freelance journalists primarily to validate AI-generated content, but eventually the AI tool was randomly assigning journalists' bylines to purely AI-generated stories without their knowledge. In one incident, BNN published a story about an unnamed Irish broadcaster facing sexual misconduct allegations and paired it with a photo of Dave Fanning, a prominent Irish DJ who was not involved in the case. The story appeared on MSN.com through Microsoft's content licensing agreement with BNN, making it visible for hours to anyone in Ireland using Microsoft Edge browser. Fanning filed a defamation lawsuit against both BNN and Microsoft in January. During its two-year operation, BNN claimed 10 million monthly visitors and was linked to by major news organizations, but NewsGuard identified it as one of over 800 AI-powered sites producing unreliable content. The site frequently published false information, fabricated quotes, and stole content from legitimate news sources. BNN went dormant in April 2024 after Google updated its algorithms to reduce unoriginal content, and Microsoft terminated its licensing agreement with the site.
Domain classification, causal taxonomy, severity scores, and national security assessments were LLM-classified and may contain errors.
AI systems that inadvertently generate or spread incorrect or deceptive information, which can lead to inaccurate beliefs in users and undermine their autonomy. Humans that make decisions based on false beliefs can experience physical, emotional or material harms
AI system
Due to a decision or action made by an AI system
Unintentional
Due to an unexpected outcome from pursuing a goal
Post-deployment
Occurring after the AI model has been trained and deployed