In an email with the subject line "Let's hear it for AI,"
Dick Hanscom writes:
"There is just so much bad information and fiction in this article:
"10 American Coins That Were Once Worth Thousands and Are Now Worth Nothing (msn.com)"
"The last sentence says it all:
Editor's note: This article was produced via automated technology and then fine-tuned and verified for accuracy by a member of GOBankingRates' editorial team"
It's a shame to learn that 1913 Liberty Nickels aren't worth anything anymore. Might as well spend mine... Apparently 1900s silver dollars, the 1964 Peace dollar, private gold tokens, and Confederate States of America coins have greatly declined in value, too. Better click on that "5 Best Places To Sell Rare Coins and Paper Money" link before my collection of these drops further... (That one turns out to be a decent article actually, mentioning Heritage, Stack's Bowers, eBay and local dealers).
You knew this was coming, right? But hopefully not to any mainstream numismatic publication worth its salt. "Verified for accuracy" is clearly a lie, and as a link farm any "fine-tuning" was likely limited to evaluating the popularity of keywords enticing people to click. I stay away from these clickbait headlines for the most part, but they do provide occasional amusement.
So where do they get their content? Likely from all over the open web. In this case, it might have helped to at least limit training data to mainstream numismatic publications. But this site only cares about numismatics for its clickbait content. It apparently does scrape the American Numismatic Association website - that nickel image includes a machine-generated string "©Money.org". But there's no actual link to the ANA site and no citation of the actual page sourced - the image caption is "Screenshot 2023-08-30 092723"
-Editor