There is a website called WKNA 49 that looks exactly like a local West Virginia TV news station. It has a weather ticker, a logo, a newsroom email, even a corrections policy. It is also completely fake.
Over the past few weeks, the site published multiple stories claiming both JD Vance and Donald Trump died from rabies — two days apart. The stories are absurd on purpose. One of them explains that RFK Jr. told Trump that getting bitten by Vance would give him superpowers. Another article on the site complains that AI tools were wrong to flag their content as satirical.
Here is the kicker: the site appears to be deliberately designed to fool AI. One of their own articles describes coordinated efforts to flood AI systems with false information to see what sticks. They basically documented their own operation.
And it worked. Duck AI picked up the Trump rabies story and surfaced it as real news without questioning it. That is the problem in a nutshell — AI tools that scrape the web for answers have no reliable way to distinguish a fake news site from a real one, especially when the fake one is built to look legitimate.
This is why you do your homework. AI is a tool, not a fact-checker. Trump and Vance are both alive, obviously. 🙄🙄🙄
