What fresh hell is this? Over the weekend, the website nationaltoday.com published a story to its “Eureka Today” section called “Taco Week Returns to Humboldt With Big Time Native Gathering.”

What, you’ve never heard of the online publication “Eureka Today”? Well, click on over there and give it a look! Check out that motto: “By the people, for the People.” The heart swells with civic pride.

Trouble is, while this website may arguably be “for the People,” in the sense that someone out there hopes you’ll click on it and promptly start buying products from its many advertisers, the content is most certainly not by any people. That’s because nationaltoday.com and its rapidly multiplying collection of local bureaus (each sporting that ironic “By the people” motto) is merely an excretion of AI slop generated by Silicon Valley servers running large language models.

And what these LLMs are consuming, besides massive volumes of water, is local news content produced by real human beings in newsrooms around the country.

As a local human being yourself, you might recognize Taco Week as a recurring advertorial feature from our friends at the North Coast Journal. Indeed, this particular “Eureka Today” story has been stolen from the NCJ, rewritten by AI and then published without attribution for the financial benefit of some avaricious dickheads in Cupertino or thereabouts. (The website is owned by a generic-looking PR firm called Top Agency.)

The Lost Coast Outpost’s content has likewise been stolen and rewritten, sans credit, by these soulless algorithms and their douchebag creators. Just today, for example, the bots decided to grab our exclusive about the Humboldt-centric infrastructure rapper Moss Gross and his recent video ode to the C Street Bicycle Boulevard. (See the baffling results here.) 

But let’s quickly circle back to this weird Taco Week/Big Time post. Not only does it feature an AI-generated, dead-eyed Native American visage in the neon color palette of Taco Bell (complete with culturally inaccurate feather headdress and earrings), but it also includes a pair of entirely fabricated quotes.

The first, which describes Taco Week as “a time-honored tradition,” is attributed to a made-up person with the imagined identity of “Juana Hernandez, Local Taco Enthusiast.” Presumably the algorithms latched onto the word “taco” and spat out a generic Hispanic name.

The other quote concerns the recent California Big Time and Social Gathering, a cultural celebration organized and hosted by many very real and very dedicated local residents. But since the AI program didn’t have easy access to their identities, it made one up and named her “Mia Redfeather.”

Más gross.