Hi there,

Did you know that computers/machines are now writing entire online articles?

Just yesterday, I noticed that someone linked to forrager.com in their article (I get notified when this happens).

But that (very long) cottage food article was ALL over the place and was rife with errors.

It covered everything from cottage food laws, to microrestaurant laws, to whether you can run a food business from a flat in Singapore, to how many Indian rupees you could potentially earn.

At first it was confusing. I was like, "How could someone write this?"

But then I quickly realized the answer: They didn't. A machine did.

Upon further investigation, that article was "written" by Amanda Simpson.

Just yesterday, she "wrote" and published over 50 articles. And each article is 3,000+ words long. In the past week alone, she published over 400 articles!

How is this possible?

It's possible because of a tool called OpenAI. It's actually an amazing tool that can do a lot of things.

But like any tool, it can be used for good, OR for not-so-good.

OpenAI can write for you. You literally give it a question/phrase to write about, and then it writes a unique, non-plagiarized blog post in seconds.

And it's quite good. You can't immediately tell that a human didn't write it. Used correctly, it provides a great starting point for writing an article.

But it's so good that now people are literally just publishing whatever the computer gives them.

And because of that, they are publishing A LOT of not-so-good stuff.

And when it comes to cottage food articles, it's especially bad.

To understand why, we need to know how OpenAI works. Basically, it draws upon the information on the internet, and then uses that knowledge to write something new.

And the more information it has, the better it works.

The problem is that not a whole lot has been written about the cottage food industry online.

The Institute for Justice and Castiron have written most of the cottage food blog posts that are out there. And of course there's Forrager's law info as well.

That's why, if you read the article mentioned above, you saw random references to the Institute for Justice and Castiron. The AI system is pulling information from their articles.

And in case you think that the article I'm mentioning is a one-off case, it's not. In the past few months, I've noticed dozens of articles randomly linking to Forrager (they always link to New York's law page, for some reason) and providing erroneous info.

Anyway, the long-and-short of it is that you now have to be even more wary of what you read online!

Until next week,
David


P.S. Remember the email I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the home baker needing to pay $5,000 to sell cookies? As of last week, that has finally been resolved!