How a Small Iowa Newspaper's Website Became an AI-Generated Clickbait Factory

In his spare time, Tony Eastin likes to dabble in the stock market. One day last year, he Googled a pharmaceutical company that seemed like a promising investment. One of the first search results Google served up on its news tab was listed as coming from the Clayton County Register, a newspaper in northeastern Iowa. The story was garbled and devoid of useful information--and so were all the other finance-themed posts filling the site, which had absolutely nothing to do with northeastern Iowa. "I knew right away there was something off," he says.