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.
Bots making websites and filling it with bots so advertising bots will buy ads that will only be seen by bots
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.
“…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?
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.
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.
This is why you need to add reddit to the search.
Which is sad as hell.
Fuck the whole advertising industry
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…
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I work at a repair shop, and we had a customer come in that said, “I like to click on the ads sometimes. Will an antivirus let me do that without 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.
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.
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.
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.
The internet as we know it is going to change dramatically very soon. Probably for the worse in the short term, but I do hope something better emerges from the ashes.
If Lemmy is an early indication, I suspect the proletariat will make our own internet. With blackjack and hookers.
What happened to reddit will probably happen on a much larger scale to the entire internet. First the enshittification destroys everything and then a new thing will emerge that much more resembles the old internet. Google’s Web Environment Integrity could be the last nail in the coffin and speed up the change significantly.
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.
Robots are making money from robots for humans. I don’t see an issue.
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
