NeimanLab: “An economics paper found subscriber retention and daily visits both increased after readers were confronted with a difficult quiz with AI-generated images. Fake books. Made-up sources. Bogus trampoline bunnies. We’re all getting a lot of AI-generated content in our feeds these days. But a new working paper suggests there’s a silver lining for trusted news organizations: they may be able to benefit from the broader degradation of the information ecosystem and win over subscribers concerned about sifting through the slop on their own. Filipe Campante, Bloomberg distinguished professor at Johns Hopkins University, was reading coverage about deep fakes and fake news in the lead-up to the election last year when he conceived of this field experiment. “My economist brain said: If something — let’s say trustworthiness — becomes really scarce, then it becomes very valuable,” Campante said. He wondered whether “being confronted with the difficulty of telling real from fake would actually make people more willing to pay for news that they trust.” Thanks to co-authors Ruben Durante (National University of Singapore), Ananya Sen (Carnegie Mellon University), and an academic working inside a news organization, Felix Hagemeister, he was able to test that hunch. Hagemeister is a data scientist at the large German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ). SZ is considered center-left in the country, comparable to, say, The New York Times in the U.S. or the Guardian in the U.K. With a daily paid circulation of 260,000 and nearly 300,000 online subscribers as of 2024, it’s the most widely sold broadsheet daily newspaper in the country. More than three-quarters of its readers live in Germany and the largest proportion of readers are between 40 and 60 years old…”