Glyphosate, A.I. and Spreading Disinformation

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 Here's a great example of how bad reporting and the war on glyphosate play hand-in-hand.  I don't know anything about the reporter, Stacey Scott at Gillett News (Gillett is a town of 32,000 in Wyoming), but the headline she/it (they use A.I. generated graphics, Stacey Scott might be an A.I. too-- no Twitter or online presence) generated has the potential to misinform. 



The Agriculture Department?  You mean the USDA?  

No.

You mean some other major government regulatory agency?

No.

Some respected international agency? 

No.

Then who "warns" ? 

It was the government of Amritsar. 

What?

Yes. Amritsar, a relatively small town/region by India standards. It's a major metropolitan hub in the northwest, not far from the Pakistan border. They have some agriculture there, mostly rice, palm oil, sugar cane and maize, apparently a lot of Basmati rice which is exported from small-holder farms.

According to Scott's article, glyphosate is "a chemical known to cause cancer since 2018."  In reading everything I can on the subject, I saw no evidence of such conclusion. 

Gillett News appears to be all A.I. generated or Stacey Scott is extremely prolific.  She had 10 articles written on August 10th, and at least 70 (I stopped counting) launch on August 13th. To my eye these are articles that are curated and written by A.I.

This interpretation makes sense, as the conclusion "glyphosate causes cancer" would likely assemble from online claims. Garbage in, garbage out.

I dug a little deeper on the subject.  Amritsar's Chief Agriculture Officer recently called for a ban of fungicides, insecticides and herbicides in "chemical free" Basmati rice production. Why?  Because rice exports were being rejected because residue levels exceeded allowable levels. My guess is that small farmers with their livelihoods on the line, were a little overzealous with application in an interest to save their crop, and it was rejected upon export. 

But the headline from an apparently A.I. generated newsletter, from a robot reporter was all GM Watch needed to amplify the headline. 


This is how false information spreads, and get ready for more of it as A.I. constructs real-looking articles that are nothing by eye candy to grab readers, hoping they'll click a link and buy some socks, a few cents of the sale going back to the "news" outlet. 

But can the average person tell the difference? Absolutely not.  Such claims appear as credible, they reinforce the biases and errors of GM Watch's audience-- despite not being supported by any hard evidence or regulatory decision. 







 

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