OpenAI's super PAC is funding AI-generated news site attacking industry critics

6 days ago (modelrepublic.org)

Probably doing something similar here.

This place average post went from “look at this new javascript framework” to “I just became 100x more productive with AI” in the last 3 years

  • I’ve noticed this too. I’ve seen a ton ai defenders and hype people here. It’s embarrassing.

    • It was embarrassing a year+ ago when much of this technology barely worked at all.

      If you did not perceive a step change in model capabilities in late 2025, it's possible you are working on problems that are just too hard or not well aligned (e.g., arts and crafts). If you are working on software and need to move the occasional mountain, it's really hard to argue with the capabilities of contemporary models and harnesses.

      This space is evolving rapidly. Faster in some areas than others, but you should still keep an open mind and adapt to the new realities as they emerge. Wishing for a thing to fail can blind you to more opportunities than you would probably be willing to reject if they were presented directly.

      15 replies →

    • Please don't imply every "AI defender" is a bot.

      LLMs are clearly world changing technology. I'm no fan of the big corporations but I'm very excited to see the models themselves develop. I'm looking forward to the day I can self host these things.

      14 replies →

    • I honestly think even the hypebros are less embarrassing than the full-on Luddites that think LLMs are an ontological evil.

      It should really not surprise you that Hacker News, a community with an extremely technical audience, is interested in a bleeding edge technical tool that is literally completely reshaping the industry.

      1 reply →

  • It would be cool to see HN internal stats over the last 5 years. New users, posts from different accounts and etc.

    • Yeah. Could be astroturfing. Could just be a surge in enthusiasm after 10 years when all we had to be excited about was a new Javascript framework.

      Your analysis by account age might be telling

      31 replies →

  • Yeah but that's just how things have gone. My enthusiasm about a new JavaScript framework is practically zero these days compared to several years ago, and I do genuinely use AI for all of my coding especially since I developed a health issue that prevents me from typing

  • I'm not gonna say where we're at now is better, but as someone who has never had any interest in webdev, the perpetual JavaScript frameworks baffled me. How could they still be interesting and how was there not one that was good enough yet?

  • I understand why forums don't expose user IDs for scraping, but man it would be nice to just be able to tag users online with accounts created after the introduction of ChatGPT.

  • I don’t suppose that could have anything to do with the fact that AI has become a huge part of day to day business in the tech industry and elsewhere? Totally mystifying that anyone would say anything about that!

  • Or, you know, many people genuinely find it exciting to see AI pumping their long overdue side-projects, just like many people once found bikeshedding their frontend frameworks exciting?

  • Neither was true. It is most skeptical community ever, including AI. To the point I'm convinced astroturfing is done by malicious parties.

  • What's missing is a balanced view.

    People are easily divided and suddenly in a binary position.

    You're either totally pro AI and can't stop talking about it all the time, it's like your new god.

    Or you're a hater. And old-school person, who deceived themselves and got a good portion of their self-worth from typing strange invocations in an even stranger electronic device.

    Both are bullshit, but if you're not in either camp you get flack from both.

    My (!) reality is that it's useful technology, but far from the claims that were made by the people trying to sell (!) it.

    I've seen quite some improvements over the years, but I haven't seen the claims materialized in any release in the last 18+ months.

    Yes, it's impressive, yes, it's probably here to stay in some form or another.

    But it's not Skynet, GLaDOS or even HAL ...

Perfectly rational.

Unleash bots and sock puppets, generate mindless hype. Add a bit of circular accounting.

Watch the investments roll in and the share price soar up.

Profit...

>But there don’t seem to be any contributors, or at least not human ones. I ran every article on the site through Pangram (the AI detector that credibly claims a near-zero false-positive rate). Of the 94 articles, 69% came back flagged as fully AI-generated, with another 28% flagged as partially AI-generated. Only three articles were classified as human-authored.

How credible is this credible claim?

  • Regardless of that claim, here’s a good test for how real this site is - it’s called “The Wire by Acutus”, but try to find a site for “Acutus”.

    Is it Acutus Medical, a “cardiac arrhythmia management company”, or Acutus Partners, “Expert healthcare consulting for transformative growth strategies that empower healthcare organizations to thrive and succeed”?

    Neither seem obviously correct, and there are no other good candidates, not to mention that the lack of a link from “The Wire” to its supposed parent is suspicious.

    • >but try to find a site for “Acutus”.

      Interesting test to the modern marketing theory that something needs a website to be real and tangible these days.

      Its certainly worth following up on. Its cool and good to know who is paying someone.

      But like, running a news site seems like something everyone is welcome to try and fail at?

      My only concern is the idea that AI text has magical properties that can be tested and verified with 99% accuracy.

  • If anything this shows how pangram is unreliable. Chances are, if someone is running an article generation thing, it'll be 100% generated. Writing 3 / 100 articles "by hand" doesn't make any sense.

    • They do seem to have an internal review process, some articles might have been heavily edited, particularly early in the development process.

      But indeed, if Pangram is marketing itself as "near-zero false-positives" now, that entails that the are aggressively biasing it towards being conservative, likely leading to lots of false-negatives and low match scores on AI content.

  • I'm now suspicious this author (had AI) built the blog they're referencing just so they could make claims against OpenAI.

Is there a state in which this constitutes fraud?

  • It would have to be state law so the president can't pardon them.

    • > would have to be state law so the president can't pardon them

      Sure. Based on cursory analysis, California (B&P § 17200 + § 17941), New York (§ 63(12)) and New Hampshire (RSA 664:14 / 664:16 + RSA 358-A) seem to be good places to start. Worst case, we get a public record of who paid for what under what pretences.

      4 replies →

  • Unfortunately you're not going to see any sort of legal redress against American oligarchs in any sort of American legal venue.

    A country like France has shown that they're willing to take no an oligarch[0], and they have the nuclear means to protect themselves from American oligarchs leveraging the American military to punish France for doing so.

    This kind of stuff will continue until a country like France forces a jet carrying someone like Musk, Altman, Thiel, or Zuckerberg to land so that they can be arrested, tried, convicted, and forced to spend a few years to decades in a drab little room.

    [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel...

Fraud, but a presidential pardon has already been paid for in advance.

  • You know whats crazy? We’re in bizarre times were this can actually be true. Things we joked about before which was obviously too nonsensical to be true is no longer the case in my world.

    • The tricky part about “layer 2 sarcasm” is that it has a tendency to inspire exactly the wrong people in to making it true

The only reason OpenAI wants to give 5% of the company to the US government is so they become 'to big to fail'. They dont give a s** about the US, its just a way to get funding when the bubble bursts

Funny, I was told by HN commenters that worries about AI risk are just a clever marketing strategy on the part of OpenAI and friends. I wonder why they would be working so hard to push back?

  • Recent events have shown that it's a double-edged sword. Sure the Mythos hype probably drove a lot of sales and investment, but it also led to a crackdown from the government.

  • Regulatory capture. They are the hyperscalers who invested and still invest heavily in hard tech, like data centers. They need regulation of "uncontrolled" AI models, so that Joe Smoe doesn't ditch his ChatGPT subscription and uses his local LLMs and agent harness setup in his home lab. Or some open weights model, or the condensed Chinese ones... it's "regulate everything else to death that is better than our enshittified OG models behind a paywall".

    The trajectory is clear and the hyperscalers are in an disadvantage: they need to become bigger and bigger while models, frameworks and harnesses that are "good enough" for 95% of all people become smaller and specialized hardware becomes cheaper and less energy hungry. In the end the only viable customers that are left for the big ones is the military and... the military. But even the Pentagon realizes that a decentralized less fragile approach is actually safer instead of having big data centers that could be Wildberried by an adversary, that is if the alcoholic in charge isn't firing some generals who act too smart again. Machine vision which isn't even real AI is capable of destroying targets in Ukraine for instance. Dirt cheap. And Palantir's Maven Smart System was incapable of predicting the most obvious flaws in the Iran war, like how easy it is to to strike US bases or close the Strait of Hormuz. I'm not saying condensing the killchain is useless, I'm saying that it's not everything.

    People aren't dumb. So they must be strong-manned and cheated into submission.

    • If AI industry critics are valuable as a means of OpenAI achieving regulatory capture, why is OpenAI attacking critics using underhanded means, as in the OP?

> When I ran the message through Pangram, an AI content detector that credibly claims a near-zero false-positive rate, the email came back as “fully AI-generated.”

Uh huh.. AI content detectors don't work.

This article plays right into my biases but I don't think it's actually very credible? They're just guessing that some unknown blog is funded by OpenAI because it has maybe-AI-generated articles that use similar talking points

"These are the talking points of Leading The Future, the $125 million super PAC funded primarily by OpenAI president Greg Brockman"

I'm sure OpenAI is doing a tonne of astroturfing but my god this is weak

  • I agree that the connection to OpenAI is very speculative here. It's true that Pangram is also very unreliable, and the match is pretty weak anyways: "69% came back flagged as fully AI-generated, with another 28% flagged as partially AI-generated".

    But the analysis of the internal admin pages for generating articles, the API and the interview structure are pretty damming evidence that this is largely driven by AI.

    • Oh with that I wasn't arguing the blog wasn't AI. I'm sure it is. My point there is that stating that any Pangram settles anything is a huge mark against the author's credibility

Of course they do. Using their own slop generators to propagate their marketing lies is probably cheaper than paying shills.

“Using your own firm’s president as a supposedly independent expert, without acknowledging the relationship, is a striking departure from basic journalistic norms”

Well that’s about the nicest possible way to phrase that…

Why do people insist on giving shady characters the benefit of the doubt? It’s pretty clear what’s happening here and yet the level of effort put into avoiding judgement seems excessive.

Grok's unhinged mode is amazing for trolling anti-ai cooks. I've been having a blast.