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.
Fuck the whole advertising industry
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
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.
Yeah, Google and Microsoft brought this on themselves.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, but remember you’re not Google’s customer so … win-win for them
This is why you need to add reddit to the search.
Which is sad as hell.
Robots are making money from robots for humans. I don’t see an issue.
Bots making websites and filling it with bots so advertising bots will buy ads that will only be seen by bots
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.
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.
is going to change dramatically very soon
Again?
The internet has been dying and changing for the worst for a long time.
Websites trying to be a one stop all on one site that keeps you there are 90% of web traffic these days.
Having multiple bookmarks for multiple sites for individual reasons are the small user basis.
Sites like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, tik tok and YouTube etc are the majority of web useage. Gone are the days of forums for bespoke interests.
Discord as a closed ecosystem with none threaded or web searchable topics.
Ad ladden shit hole news sites. Click bait shite etc are the norm.
Gone are the days of enjoyabls fun to explore web surfing.
I feel Lemmy is the new … eh forums golden age or something. Anyone will quickly be able to fire up an instance, I mean anyone can fire up a community today already!
We have been spoonfed dopamine triggers since Facebook came around, before that you’d be on the internet because you actively wanted something. I hope that’s coming back.
Grr /old rant off :-)
Gone are the days of forums for bespoke interests.
What about Lemmy?
deleted by creator
If Lemmy is an early indication, I suspect the proletariat will make our own internet. With blackjack and hookers.
And enormous compute capacity and volunteer hours.
The internet, or the web? Me and the other gopher/Gemini weirdos are gonna be fine.
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.
The web is not the internet.
If Google does that, the people who cares will migrate to something else.
Example: the fediverse.
The fediverse runs on the web, though.
But not exclusively. That’s why there are apps for it.
If the API is HTTP based, then it would be a matter of implementing another non-web-based protocol.
Edit: I’m not saying I would get rid of HTTP. I like RESTful services where they make sense. I’m just emphasizing that the fediverse doesn’t have to depend on one single protocol.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with HTTP. Abandoning it would be like eliminating German because it was the language the Nazis used.
Fair point.
And you win today’s Godwin Award!
Who did I compare to a Nazi?
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.
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.
Dead internet here we go! 
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.
Just let it burn. The internet has gone to shit anyway.
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
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…
“Junk websites filled with AI-generated text”
And here I thought this was going to be a headline about Reddit.
It still could be.
The irony that this story was posted by a bot…
