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.

  • @Meowoem@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    12 years ago

    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

  • @Hyperi0n@lemmy.film
    link
    fedilink
    English
    32 years ago

    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.

    • @Asafum@feddit.nl
      link
      fedilink
      English
      02 years ago

      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.

    • phillaholic
      link
      fedilink
      English
      832 years ago

      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.

      • @FredericChopin_@feddit.uk
        link
        fedilink
        English
        382 years ago

        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.

        • phillaholic
          link
          fedilink
          English
          172 years ago

          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?

          • @FredericChopin_@feddit.uk
            link
            fedilink
            English
            122 years ago

            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.

          • @jballs@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            English
            21
            edit-2
            2 years ago

            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.

            • phillaholic
              link
              fedilink
              English
              22 years ago

              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.

      • @NotYourSocialWorker@feddit.nu
        link
        fedilink
        English
        62 years ago

        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.

        • phillaholic
          link
          fedilink
          English
          52 years ago

          I tried it for a few days initially but it was confidently wrong a third of the time, or very slow.

          • @Ilikepornaddict@lemmynsfw.com
            link
            fedilink
            English
            82 years ago

            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.

  • @XPost3000@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    362 years ago

    Bots making websites and filling it with bots so advertising bots will buy ads that will only be seen by bots

  • Avid Amoeba
    link
    fedilink
    English
    212 years ago

    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.

  • Amphobet
    link
    fedilink
    English
    332 years ago

    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.

    • El Barto
      link
      fedilink
      English
      32 years ago

      is going to change dramatically very soon

      Again?

    • @CustodialTeapot@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      292 years ago

      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.

      • @Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.com
        link
        fedilink
        English
        62 years ago

        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 :-)

      • El Barto
        link
        fedilink
        English
        92 years ago

        Gone are the days of forums for bespoke interests.

        What about Lemmy?

    • @fsxylo@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      282 years ago

      If Lemmy is an early indication, I suspect the proletariat will make our own internet. With blackjack and hookers.

    • @hardypart@feddit.de
      link
      fedilink
      English
      10
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      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.

      • El Barto
        link
        fedilink
        English
        -22 years ago

        The web is not the internet.

        If Google does that, the people who cares will migrate to something else.

        Example: the fediverse.

          • El Barto
            link
            fedilink
            English
            -3
            edit-2
            2 years ago

            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.

  • @Sheik@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    802 years ago

    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.

  • @hardypart@feddit.de
    link
    fedilink
    English
    62 years ago

    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.

    • @PutangInaMo@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      22 years ago

      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

  • @MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    52 years ago

    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…