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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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Even the porn?
Especially the porn.
The reply I was waiting for!
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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.
I’ve been seeing a lot of “passive income” b.s. coming from YouTube. They’re tutorials, or at least shorts that point you at tutorials on how to build a site that effectively scrapes the web for news about a topic and uses LLMs to essentially rewrite articles about a topic in a new style.
It’s just automated journalistic copying. Not new, but now done entirely by machines. In the past, news stations would regurgitate content from eachother all the time, especially for fluff pieces. This is just that, but without any actual people involved. Some of these tutorials claim to be able to produce upwards of a thousand dollars a month in passive income per site, or something like that… Usually the person describing the scheme confesses that they have dozens of these sites running and no longer need to actually work.
It’s the digital version of being a landlord. You squat the domain, steal the content, serve it up to unsuspecting people, and rake in the profits… All without lifting a finger, or doing anything that actually helps anyone.
We all knew this was happening, people are getting upset about it because the news media did it first, and now these folks are taking their jobs!
How dare they.
I briefly considered it, but I don’t want to contribute to the downfall of the internet as something that’s useful… So I’m not going to be doing this. It did give me a good idea to essentially replace myself with an AI at my workplace, I’d just be doing the actual work but for any communication, I’d just plug in the original email and a few keywords about the solution, let the AI do the typing, then just review/edit the response and send. It would save me hours of time daily…
I’d like to help. What’s the best way to create a garbage site to make money off these advertising scums? I’ll give the money to planned parenthood.
I think it’s just gonna land on the consumer in the end. More expensive to advertise? Better raise the prices so our bottom line is still nice and fat
Surely we’ll see a new Ad crash soon. The entire internet seems to be run on ads and sponsorships which doesn’t sound stable to me.
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.
Fuck the whole advertising industry
Keep the Reddit-slamming to appropriate fo— wait. This is about OTHER junk websites with AI-generated text. Carry on.
The irony that this story was posted by a bot…
It’s been this way for ages, though it was mechanical Turk created text and stolen content.
I don’t really mind adverts, like when I see a creator I like doing a raid shadow legends bit I’m happy to see that they’re making money from a shitty game rather than me having to pay.
And I know the established wisdom is that they track everything you do and say but honestly half my adverts are for things that make no sense to me like tampons and investment services, I really think them saying how well they know the user is just to get a advertiser money and isn’t really as true as we fear. Not that I think it’s a good thing but it’s so trivial compared to everything else happening in the world Iv don’t really care
Oh no :( Won’t somebody think of the poor advertisers???
It affects me, the user, because I have to sift through garbage sites, because advertisers pay to keep those garbage sites online. So I think it’s a problem worth discussing and addressing.
I like this
@L4s I’m still - and always have - wondering who clicks on all this shit. No ad makes money without a “conversion” into some sort of sale. I believe it’s all a circlejerking of various add companies scamming each other. At some point this useless well of crap must dry out. And now even the content is complete and utter nonsense… so nobody is going to even look at it. how’s that supposed to hold up
We’ve been asking ourselves this about email spam for several decades now.
I think we’re vastly overestimating human intelligence. There’s obviously enough completely clueless people out there that will buy what these spammers are selling.
I heard it said that spam is intentionally badly written because they don’t want people who can figure out it’s a scam to actually click the links.
Morning radio show I used to listen to talked all the time about the crap they bought off Instagram and tiktok ads. Like, ALL THE TIME. My ex and her family also bought a fair bit off of those sort of ads. Some type of people are just susceptible to it and others aren’t.
I’m not normally in favor of the death penalty, but I think we need public executions for spammers.
I think you are underestimating the power of low cost high volume advertising. Throw enough poo at a glass wall and some of its going to stick. This isn’t going away, it’s getting worse.
It’s been a while since I’ve interacted with google ads, but if memory serves, by default, the dashboards don’t (or can’t) break down sales per site, it’s mostly impressions per category of ad deployment. “Clickthrough rate among banner ads on news websites” etc. It wouldn’t surprise me if the same makers of these spam websites also run bots that click the ads and prop up those metrics that 99% of advertisers don’t drill down through beyond surface level. Advertisers probably see clickthrough is good on a deployment and just assumes sales come from those.
I remember years ago someone from a niche industry commenting on this.
He was saying that the week they all had a big conferences, the click-throughs dropped by 95% (implying his competitors were clicking his ads to cost him money)
I work at a repair shop, and we had a customer come in that said, “I like to click on the ads sometimes. Is that why I keep getting viruses?”.
I do understand the curiosity though, just seeing what malware is trying to do can be quite interesting. Maybe someone should tell that person about VMs though lol
That’s definitely not why. From how I understood it, it seems that she clicked on ads because she actually wanted to look at the product, and she was confused about why she kept getting malware on her computer.
Some ads are paid on a “per view” basis rather than per click
When the sites are bot built like the ones described here its just a matter of Large Numbers. Create a thousand permutations of porhub and if they all only get a few thousand views a day in total you’ve made some money.
I see it all the time when I’m searching for answers on the web. Ngl I look up a lot of stuff for C# and C++ and if you use Google (and even DDG) you’ll always fine a couple of these. Google likes to put them up first. You can tell by the language in the article and the stripped down content on the page. I always end up backing out and I have ad-blockers but they still get the click.
The irony of tagging and asking a bot this lol
They’re on Mastodon. Mastodon replies work by tagging.
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
Soon the entire internet will just be bots shit posting back and forth.
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.
TBH i feel like some social media would even profit of this.
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…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.
