---
title: "Evil Research Generates Fake Comments on News Stories"
description: "A new AI algorithm can read through news stories and generate comments that resemble those written by actual human readers."
date: "2019-09-30"
modified: "2019-09-30"
authors:
  - name: "Dan Robitzski"
    link: "https://futurism.com/authors/danrobitzski"
url: "https://futurism.com/the-byte/research-fake-comments-news"
categories:
  - "Artificial Intelligence"
tags:
  - "artificial intelligence"
  - "news"
  - "spam"
  - "the digest"
---

# Evil Research Generates Fake Comments on News Stories

![A new AI algorithm can read through news stories and generate comments that resemble those written by actual human readers.](<https://futurism.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/research-generates-fake-comments-news.jpg>)
*\<em\>Image: Victor Tangermann\</em\>*

## Smarter Spambots

Just what we need, according to a team of researchers with nothing better to do: bots spamming online news articles with AI-generated comments.

A new algorithm called DeepCom can read simplified versions of news stories and churn out comments that resemble those written by human internet-goers, [according to research](<https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.11974>) shared on the preprint server *ArXiv* last week. Purportedly designed to help news sites jumpstart new comments sections, the algorithm seems like yet another way to [fill the web](<https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-ruin-internet-tsunami-fake-news>) with pointless spam.

## Conversation Starter

The engineers, who hail from Microsoft and China's Beihang University, built two versions of DeepCom for English and Chinese-language sites.

For the Chinese version, the algorithm was fed headlines, news stories, and sample comments from *Tencent News*. The English version got the same from a dataset of *Yahoo News* articles that were also annotated a bit more heavily to help the algorithm along.

## Context Clues

Compared to other comment-generating algorithms that focus just on a news article's keywords or headline, DeepCom's output was far more realistic.

The research paper provides a case study where DeepCom commented "the rockets are going to have a lot of fun in this series" on a news article about the Houston Rockets, for instance — while the other algorithms spewed out nonsense that would have immediately been flagged as spam.

**More on AI-generated text:** *[New AI Generates Horrifyingly Plausible Fake News](<https://futurism.com/ai-generates-fake-news>)*

## Author
Dan Robitzki is a senior reporter for Futurism, where he likes to cover AI, tech ethics, and medicine. He spends his extra time fencing and streaming games from Los Angeles, California.

### Author social links  
[Twitter](<https://x.com/danrobitzski>)