How a local website was hijacked and filled with AI-generated 'coherent gibberish'
Photo:
RNZ
The headline states: "This valley is no longer safe for overnight stays - and DOC isn't explaining why."
The story that follows conjures a scene from a horror film. Something odd has been going on in Whakataki valley east of Mount Aspiring National park, it is claimed.
"Today, it's officially been closed to overnight stays - and the Department of Conservation isn't saying exactly why."
A former hut warden, identified only by their first name, is quoted. An anonymous DOC worker adds: "There's more going on than we can talk about right now."
As intriguing as it all sounds, none of it is true.
This story is among a growing number of invented stories published to harvest views at the domain morningside.nz/news. The website exists to give people information about an Auckland entertainment precinct but the news section is full of weird, bogus stories like this one that don't seem to belong.
There is a Whakataki, but it's in the North Island not in Fiordland, like the story suggests.
Another article claims DOC has put steel barriers across the entrance to Echo Hole, which it says is a cave tucked into a limestone bluff, in the South Island back country.
According to DOC, there are numerous caves in Waitaki, but none called Echo Hole. The photo used in the story appears to be generated by artificial intelligence (AI). It shows a cave surrounded by rain forest.
"The Waitaki district in the South Island is quite a dry district. It doesn't really have rain forest," DOC's manager of visitor safety and standards Andy Roberts told RNZ.
DOC staff stumbled across the stories online earlier this month. All come from the same morningside.nz website, and many follow a pattern of taking a real place name, but applying it to the wrong part of New Zealand and making up a story.
In several of the stories, DOC is cast as unforthcoming about reasons for supposed closures, and often the discovery of taonga is mentioned as a possible theory. None of the stories related to DOC are true.
What is going on at morningside.nz?
Rod Ballenden, who runs the site, says it has been "hacked". The news section was added to the site and is being populated with the articles, which are all crammed full of digital ads. They are still trying to remove the stories but it's proving difficult, Ballenden says.
Cyber security expert Adam Boileau says he suspects the domain name may have not been renewed by the site owner. Expiry details are public, and people look out for ones soon to expire.
"They can basically snipe the domains that expire out from underneath their original owners."
What is a little more unusual in this case is that the original website was left intact, and just a fake news section added.
"I think in this case, because it's someone who's trying to leverage the existing reputation. They want that value to continue. Keeping the original services and making the original site owner not notice that anything's happened is a kind of a good way to preserve their investment."
Boileau, who is technology editor at the 'Risky Business' podcast, thinks the site owner may be able to lodge a dispute with New Zealand's domain name registry to wrest ownership back.
"All this feels like, you know, it's just every day on the shady modern internet. This is just what happens."
Technology expert and author of
Fake Believe: Conspiracy Theories in Aotearoa
, Dylan Reeve says we may never know who is behind the hack, and whether it was a New Zealander, or someone offshore.
The likely motivation for the hacking was to make money off the advertising appearing on the stories. "It's just filthy with ads," he says.
The content also appears to be tailored to repeat search terms and he notes content from it is appearing in Google AI suggestions at the top of search results.
"The fundamental thing going on here is revenue harvesting," he says. "It's just coherent gibberish designed to attract attention with headlines and some vaguely plausible paragraphs of content. But it's nonsense. I would be shocked if it wasn't AI generated," Reeve says.
The automation may go beyond article text and image generation. There may be "automation flow" in use, Reeve says. This might include a tool which scrapes discussion website Reddit for popular topics, then uses these topics as a prompt for an AI tool to write the article and create an image.
"This can all happen completely autonomously and you can just be pumping those out three a day, or three a minute."
Along with numerous articles about the Department of Conservation, there are articles about petrol prices, real estate and grocery prices.
"It's all successfully click bait-y, in a way that is sort of attached to the zeitgeist of New Zealand interests."
Most of the stories include some mention of cultural issues and mention iwi, a taonga, remains, and occasionally a rāhui.
Reeve thinks the choice of a divisive element to stories is intentional. "It's probably seen that divisive topics are successful and get a lot of attention."
In some cases comments following the story express anger: "Totally ridiculous. As long as people are respectful to the area. Why can't we make the most of OUR country? We pay for it. It doesn't belong to Māori, just because they think they were there first. There was another tribe of people way before they got here."
It's not clear whether the comments are from real people, or are fake. In some stories the same, or remarkably similar comments are repeated, suggesting some or all of the comments are also fake. A common pattern is for a comment starting with the word "honestly" and a reply starting with the word "exactly".
University of Waikato research fellow Hemopereki Simon says discourse suggesting Māori aren't the indigenous population of the country isn't new but used to take place in books. In recent times these views have shifted online, particularly on social media.
Simon has recently studied racism in Twitter discussion on the Three Waters proposal. "When I say this stuff is out there, it's out there," he says.
If the comments are generated by AI, Simon is not surprised at the tone.
"AI will ultimately, to some degree, promote some type of racist tropes."
DOC's Andy Roberts has some advice for people who stumble across fake news stories about the conservation estate.
"One of the things you'll notice in these stories is they never quote an actual DOC person. So when DOC puts information out in a press release, there'll always be a person that's behind that story."
Official notices about closures are always published on the DOC website, and Roberts urged people to visit the official site to ensure they are getting correct information, rather than rely on second-hand sources.
Closures do occur, but there is a high bar for this to happen. This could be due to a real safety risk, or occasional track or hut repairs.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Otago Daily Times
3 hours ago
- Otago Daily Times
Supermarket pricing errors to be wary of
By Susan Edmunds of RNZ Consumer NZ says supermarkets are still making pricing errors, despite increasing pressure and scrutiny on them. Charges have been filed and a number of supermarkets have pleaded guilty to breaching the Fair Trading Act due to inaccurate pricing and misleading specials. But Consumer NZ says misleading specials are still costing shoppers tens of millions of dollars a year and has launched a petition calling for tougher penalties for breaches of the act. It provided examples of a number of ways that people could be caught out by misleading signage in supermarkets. Dodgy multibuy A dodgy multibuy refers to a situation where the individual price and the multibuy price don't add up to a saving. Consumer NZ pointed to this mince special where a tray of meat was $4 or people could buy three for $20. In another case, packaging seemed to be making a confusing difference. Two individual backs of Gingernuts were selling for $5 but the club price for a 500g twin-pack was $5.59. Different pricing Sometimes the price on the shelf tag does not match what you pay at checkout. In this case, supplied by Consumer, the price tag on the shelf said $27, but the customer paid more than $35 at the checkout. Confusing Sometimes it's just hard to work out what the price is. Consumer provided an example of double cream brie was "reduced" to $10.60 for a quick sale - or was it on sale for $9.80? Mismatches Sometimes it seems as though there are multiple labels for the same item. In this case, two signs had two different prices for a single avocado. "One said $1.69. The other said $1.99," Consumer NZ spokesperson Abby Damen said. "The customer was charged $1.99. She returned two days later to ask what could be done about the pricing error. She was offered a refund of the price difference but after pointing out the supermarket's new refund policy, she was refunded $2 and also kept her avocado." Chief executive at Consumer Jon Duffy said anyone who was charged more than the shelf price was entitled by law to a refund of the difference. He said both supermarket chains promised a full refund in that scenario, but consumers sometimes had to know that was what was available. A Foodstuffs spokesperson said with more than 14,000 products in a typical supermarket, and prices changing frequently due to supplier costs, promotions or new product liens, pricing was a complex job. "But for our customers, it's simple. They rightly expect the price on the shelf to match what they pay at the checkout," he said. "We take pricing accuracy as seriously as health and safety, aiming for zero errors. "Across our local, family-owned stores, we manage tens of thousands of price labels and process millions of transactions every week, and we've invested in better systems, daily checks and electronic shelf labels to help get it right. "If we do get it wrong, our policy is that the customer gets a refund and keeps the product. We've also strengthened staff training and store processes to make sure pricing is clear and accurate." Woolworths said it had more 3.5 million transactions in our stores each week "and sometimes errors do occur". "When they do, we try to make things right, through our long-standing and market-leading refund policy. Under that policy, if a customer is charged more than the advertised price for a product, they get a full refund and can keep the product." Duffy said Consumer had received 20 complaints about supermarket pricing since Tuesday. A normal rate would be two a day, he said.
Otago Daily Times
3 hours ago
- Otago Daily Times
Four common supermarket price errors to look out for
By Susan Edmunds of RNZ Consumer NZ says supermarkets are still making pricing errors, despite increasing pressure and scrutiny on them. Charges have been filed and a number of supermarkets have pleaded guilty to breaching the Fair Trading Act due to inaccurate pricing and misleading specials. But Consumer NZ says misleading specials are still costing shoppers tens of millions of dollars a year and has launched a petition calling for tougher penalties for breaches of the act. It provided examples of a number of ways that people could be caught out by misleading signage in supermarkets. Dodgy multibuy A dodgy multibuy refers to a situation where the individual price and the multibuy price don't add up to a saving. Consumer NZ pointed to this mince special where a tray of meat was $4 or people could buy three for $20. In another case, packaging seemed to be making a confusing difference. Two individual backs of Gingernuts were selling for $5 but the club price for a 500g twin-pack was $5.59. Different pricing Sometimes the price on the shelf tag does not match what you pay at checkout. In this case, supplied by Consumer, the price tag on the shelf said $27, but the customer paid more than $35 at the checkout. Confusing Sometimes it's just hard to work out what the price is. Consumer provided an example of double cream brie was "reduced" to $10.60 for a quick sale - or was it on sale for $9.80? Mismatches Sometimes it seems as though there are multiple labels for the same item. In this case, two signs had two different prices for a single avocado. "One said $1.69. The other said $1.99," Consumer NZ spokesperson Abby Damen said. "The customer was charged $1.99. She returned two days later to ask what could be done about the pricing error. She was offered a refund of the price difference but after pointing out the supermarket's new refund policy, she was refunded $2 and also kept her avocado." Chief executive at Consumer Jon Duffy said anyone who was charged more than the shelf price was entitled by law to a refund of the difference. He said both supermarket chains promised a full refund in that scenario, but consumers sometimes had to know that was what was available. A Foodstuffs spokesperson said with more than 14,000 products in a typical supermarket, and prices changing frequently due to supplier costs, promotions or new product liens, pricing was a complex job. "But for our customers, it's simple. They rightly expect the price on the shelf to match what they pay at the checkout," he said. "We take pricing accuracy as seriously as health and safety, aiming for zero errors. "Across our local, family-owned stores, we manage tens of thousands of price labels and process millions of transactions every week, and we've invested in better systems, daily checks and electronic shelf labels to help get it right. "If we do get it wrong, our policy is that the customer gets a refund and keeps the product. We've also strengthened staff training and store processes to make sure pricing is clear and accurate." Woolworths said it had more 3.5 million transactions in our stores each week "and sometimes errors do occur". "When they do, we try to make things right, through our long-standing and market-leading refund policy. Under that policy, if a customer is charged more than the advertised price for a product, they get a full refund and can keep the product." Duffy said Consumer had received 20 complaints about supermarket pricing since Tuesday. A normal rate would be two a day, he said.
RNZ News
6 hours ago
- RNZ News
Submissions for bill criminalising migrant exploitation set to close
Several high-profile cases of migrant exploitation have been uncovered in Auckland in recent years. Photo: RNZ / Blessen Tom Public submissions for a bill that seeks to criminalise migrant exploitation close on Monday. Immigration Minister Erica Stanford introduced the Immigration (Fiscal Sustainability and System Integrity) Amendment Bill on 7 April, proposing several amendments relating to offences, penalties and proceedings, among others. The bill passed its first reading on 24 June and was referred to the Education and Workforce Select Committee. Introducing the bill in Parliament, Stanford outlined 10 amendments the bill sought to make in the Immigration Act 2009, noting its focus on tackling migrant exploitation. "The bill addresses a gap in New Zealand's migrant exploitation settings by creating a new offence, which is to knowingly seek or receive a monetary premium for an offer of employment," Stanford said. "Charging premiums for employment is an increasing form of migrant exploitation and it causes real harm. Often premiums are in the realm of tens of thousands of dollars," she said. "Currently, the legislation does not cover premiums that are paid before the employment commences, premiums that are made offshore, or situations where a premium is sought or received by someone other than the employer," she said. "This change makes it even clearer that this behaviour is not tolerated in New Zealand. It will enable us to prosecute more instances of migrant exploitation and hold exploitative behaviour to account." The bill proposes inserting a new section in the Immigration Act 2009 that creates a new offence. "It will be an offence for an employment-related person to knowingly seek or receive a premium in respect of the employment or potential employment in New Zealand of a victim," the draft bill reads. "New section 351A(1) applies before the victim starts work in New Zealand and whether or not they actually start work in New Zealand." Under the proposed section, a person is defined as a victim if they are domiciled in New Zealand or based overseas and fall within the category of an unlawful worker, a temporary entry class visa holder, a potential temporary entry class visa holder or a potential residence class visa holder. If approved, section 351A would make it an offence to charge premiums for employment, irrespective of whether a worker has started employment. At present, the offence only captures situations in which people are actively working in New Zealand and where the employer is the one charging the premium. The proposed bill widens the scope to include a potential employer, agent or any person involved in the recruitment of a victim. The penalty for the new offence will be imprisonment for a term not exceeding seven years, a fine not exceeding $100,000 or both. Arunjeev Singh, general secretary of the New Zealand Forum for Immigration Professionals, criticised some of the bill's content, arguing it gave "unfettered power" to immigration officers and went beyond the relationship of an employer and employee. Other immigration advisors told RNZ they questioned whether such legislation could be enforced in another jurisdiction if passed into law.
