The gaslighting of Chico through a fake ‘local’ newsletter being written by A.I.

By Scott Thomas Anderson

“I fear the day when technology overlaps with our humanity,” Albert Einstein reflected. “The world will only have a generation of idiots.”

Or a cohort of incurious, tech-narcotized mental younglings who constantly suck on the tit of The Machine with a manipulated sense of awareness.

You are currently reading a humanly produced editorial. I feel the need to state that because Butte County is suddenly being deluged with AI-generated newsletters. Also, the description I used above was intentionally peculiar (albeit sincere), because in an online world that’s crawling with parasitic Large Language Models – voracious plagiarizing bots that ceaselessly scrape and scavenge the archive of human writing – penning strange sentences is one of the only ways to prove that the author is of birth-canal or cesarean origin. See what I did there? It’s now the main method that I know of for staying ahead of the cyber-mimics.

But we can dispense with the Gothic prose for now.

In late January, Andrew Deck of the Nieman Journalism Lab broke a story about AI-generated newsletters that are now proliferating through 355 cities and towns across the U.S. They are titled ‘Good Daily’ and, around here, published as ‘Daily Chico.’

“Not only do these hundreds of newsletters share the same exact seven testimonials, they also share the same branding, the same copy on their about pages, and the same stated mission: ‘to make local news more accessible and highlight extraordinary people in our community,’” Deck noted in his story. “These automated agents ‘read the news’ in every town where Good Daily operates, curate the most relevant stories, summarize them, edit and approve the copy, format it into a newsletter, and publish.”

All of these AI newsletters are being operated by some start-up figure in another part of the country named Mathew Henderson.

Now, any reader who’s ever owned or managed a business will probably spot the first problem with what’s going on. Henderson’s carrion-bots are only able to function because of the battered remnants of human newsrooms that remain in any given town, or the efforts of volunteer and citizen journalists working their ass off because of their love of community. In the case of the former, someone – CN&R, North State Public Radio, The Chico Enterprise-Record, Action News Now – is paying for real human labor to do the hard reporting, and then Henderson’s AI leeches grab and re-package the content while competing for online advertisement revenue with the very agencies who produced the original content.

But perhaps the broader issue is a societal one. CN&R’s newsletter has always been put together by someone who is out and about in the community, having conversations with folks across Butte County and taking the pulse of what matters most to people. In mid-January, CN&R reporter Ken Magri published a story about all the different helpful and unique newsletters that are produced about Chico, written by living, breathing individuals in Chico. Rather than view those efforts as competition to CN&R’s newsletter and related coverage, Ken’s mindset was that – when it comes to relaying important information or celebrating life in Chico – a rising tide really does lift all boats.

With so many locals investing so much of themselves into newsletters that actually mean something about the area’s fabric life, the idea that an AI scheme is creating a poor and empty illusion of that heart-driven work should be insulting to everyone.      

And, until AI can look people in the eye and empathize with what they’re going through, these automated newsletters amount to nothing more than distracting click-bait that puts a little more money into an absentee tech founder’s pocket.  

Scott Thomas Anderson is also the writer and producer of the documentary podcast series “Drinkers with Writing Problems.”