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Junk websites filled with AI-generated text are pulling in money from programmatic ads::More than 140 brands are advertising on low-quality content farm sites —and the problem is growing fast.
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Sounds like a good gig while it lasts. Half a mind for a weekend project it seems
Reminds me of the Bing search rewards points a while back. A bunch of people I know were scripting searches and cashing in points until they got caught lmao
Exactly what I expected to happen with the rise of AI. I would laugh, but the completely senseless CO2 that this shit is causing is just sad.
I haven’t played assassins creed odessey in quite a while and I googled how to get olive wood in the game quickly.
The first 3 sites were filled with garbage AI generated tips. Like it looked passable at first glance but only 1 of the 5 tips were even possible. They suggested I use an axe to cut down trees which isn’t possible in the game at all. There was also a lot of repeating of the search phrase.
This is why I’m upset when I see everyone talking about leaving reddit and deleting their history.
I don’t even search for things without “reddit” in the search terms because literally every site is garbage now and everything that shows up in the first page or two of Google is just SEO boosted garbage.
“…wasting massive amounts of ad money.”
I don’t see this as a problem.
And our time. I’m sick of googling something and getting nothing out these fluff pieces with little or no real information. It’s made Google near useless for entire subjects. Try searching for troubleshooting on anything Apple for example.
Or the fun variant where you intentionally search for something in your native tongue because you want results relevant to your country and get badly translated articles that nowhere inform you that they are translated.
Yeah it’s even shit for dumb searches.
Decided to Google the most popular SUVs and I get a top 10 article where it expects me to click through each one so it can load a new page and ads for each item in the list.
Then you get the news tab in edge, msn news maybe and half the ads are literal scams.
The latter is infuriating to me. If I’m actually searching for a product, by all means show me an ad for the type of product I’m looking for. That’s a win-win scenario. How these mainstream sites put up literal scam ads I don’t understand. How can they be paying better than Ford?
Yeah ads are a plague and not just online.
I can’t walk around my town without having billboards and super bright ads shoved down my throat.
Driving down the motorway, yeah we’ve got ads here too. Don’t look at your phone but sure read this advert as you fly past at 70mph.
We’ve come full circle. Original web searches sucked because you couldn’t trust the results to be ranked in a useful way. You could search for a historical fact and you were just as likely to get an 8th grader’s homework they posted online instead of a credible source. Then Google came along and solved that problem with their magic algorithm. Only took them a little more than 20 years to get to the point where their algorithm now sucks so bad that we’re back to where we started. But instead of an 8th graders homework, we get AI articles that appear to be trained from said homework. Fascinating.
Google overall has just turned to shit. You can’t trust any new thing they do, and their existing ones are degrading all the time.
Especially true for Assistant, I’ve found. My Home speakers keep getting dumber and dumber all the time.
Yes, but remember you’re not Google’s customer so … win-win for them
Use bing chat, it’s currently the best search engine out there
I tried it for a few days initially but it was confidently wrong a third of the time, or very slow.
Did you switch it from creative to precise? In creative mode it’s genuinely awful, but with precise set, it always finds exactly what I’m looking for. It also has gpt-4 integration now.
This is why you need to add reddit to the search.
Which is sad as hell.
Yeah, Google and Microsoft brought this on themselves.
The fact the ad industry doesn’t have people veto the platforms they advertise on is a negative aspect of modern society. I see no issue with this going down. I’m far more lenient to capitalism when they produce sponsorships and financially aid events.
The irony that this story was posted by a bot…
Just let it burn. The internet has gone to shit anyway.
Keep the Reddit-slamming to appropriate fo— wait. This is about OTHER junk websites with AI-generated text. Carry on.
Cue the world’s smallest violin. Not sure how this is any consumer’s problem lol.
Maybe, just maybe, advertising needs to become more carefully selected and regulated rather than the clown fiesta it has been since the dawn of the internet where Google and friends want to ‘set and forget’ and milk money for eternity.
But you know the reaction won’t be sensible lol, instead we will get an AI arms race of AI adverts vs AI advert reviewers.
Haha, imagine having to solve a captcha for closing popups, so the content provider can prove to the advertisers that their shit was watched by a human.
And when that finally fails, we’ll have to auth to every website with a crypto key to prove that we’re a valid human data point.
Isn’t this what OpenAI is doing with World Coin?
It appears that there’s already a black market for the verification tokens
We?
Fuck no.
Don’t give them ideas… this is some next level evil shit. The AI bot reading this will implement it.
Soon the entire internet will just be bots shit posting back and forth.
TBH i feel like some social media would even profit of this.
ChatGPT is a predictive text engine than can already generate more coherent and accurate information than 90% of Internet Contributers and it doesn’t even have the capacity to add 5+5 together. I welcome our new overlords.
LLMs like ChatGTP are accurate only by chance, which is why you can’t really trust the info contained in what they output: if your question ended up in or near a cluster in the “language token N-space” were a good answer is, then you’ll get a good answer, otherwise you’ll get whatever is closest in the language token N-space, which might very well be complete bollocks whilst delivered in the language of absolute certainty.
It is however likely more coherent that “90% of Internet Contributers” for just generated texts (not if you get to do question and answer though: just ask something from it and if you get a correct answer say that “it’s not correct” and see how it goes).
This is actually part of the problem: in the stuff outputted by LLMs you can’t really intuit the likely accuracy of a response from the gramatical coherence and word choice of the response itself: it’s like being faced with the greatest politician in the World who is an idiot savant - perfect at memorizing what he/she heard and creating great speeches based on it whilst being a complete total moron at everything else including understanding the meaning of what he or she heard and just reshuffles and repeats to others.
Oh I know. 54% of American adults read below a 6th grade comprehension level.
Most of the answers you get out of them are accurate only by chance, which is why you can’t really trust the info contained in what they output: if your question ended up in or near a cluster in the “educated N-space” where a good answer is, then you get a good answer, otherwise you’ll get whatever is the closest “response N-space”, which is practically guaranteed to be complete bollocks whilst delivered in the language of absolute certainty.
I’d go on but I’m sure the point is made.
You mean that you believe that bots trained on text written by humans wouldn’t be just as bad as the real thing?
You sweet summer child…
How do you know it isn’t now? (see: Dead-Internet Theory)
Beat me to it, you ninja lemming
Personally I could believe most of the internet is bot activity by now, but what I don’t believe is that most of the internet that humans actually interact with is bots. Though that number is certainly rising.
Same. I’m not a conspiracy theorist. However, most top Google results are those garbage sites that are definitely not written by humans. I wonder if search will die soon as bots begin to dominate SEO (more than they already do). The search paradigm will definitely have to change.
“Junk websites filled with AI-generated text”
And here I thought this was going to be a headline about Reddit.
It still could be.
so what’s the problem? it’s a good thing that ads get served to sites that I don’t visit
It’s making search engines useless, for one thing.
Programmatic ads placed on programmatic content boosted by programmatic view bots.
More seriously, this is ridiculous. Websites are junk because they are filled with programmatic ads in the first place.
Dead internet here we go! 
Eventually, 99% of the internet will be bots talking to each other.
It was over 50% in 2017. So, it much be much higher now.
The more direct problem for people in general is that finding what you’re looking for has become even more of a “needle in a haystack” problem than it already was.
The indirect problem is that if genuine content creators can’t get much out making content (not necessarilly money: for many simply the satisfaction of seeing how many people liked their content is incentive enough) because viewers are much more dispersed due to the AI-rewritten info cloning sites, then there won’t be much new info for the cloners to copy in rewritten form, which is maybe fine for “questions already answered 1000 times” but won’t be for questions or tutorials about new stuff.
This just increases the importance of human-driven filters like Lemmy (and Reddit while it’s still relevant), as well as StackExchange for the subset of topics it encompasses.
