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.

    • phillaholic@lemm.ee
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      1 year 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.

        • phillaholic@lemm.ee
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          1 year 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?

          • jballs@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year 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@lemm.ee
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              1 year 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.

              • TurboDiesel@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                Especially true for Assistant, I’ve found. My Home speakers keep getting dumber and dumber all the time.

        • phillaholic@lemm.ee
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          1 year 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
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            1 year 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.

      • NotYourSocialWorker@feddit.nu
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        1 year 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.

  • Sheik@lemmy.world
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    1 year 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.

    • LinuxSBC@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      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?”.

      • camillaSinensis@reddthat.com
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        1 year ago

        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

        • LinuxSBC@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          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.

    • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • RivenRise@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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        1 year ago

        I’m not normally in favor of the death penalty, but I think we need public executions for spammers.

      • NotYourSocialWorker@feddit.nu
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • Dran@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • GreatAlbatross@feddit.uk
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        1 year ago

        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)

    • Imgonnatrythis@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • jecxjo@midwest.social
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • Sanctus@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Cabrio@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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          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.

          • Cabrio@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            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.

      • NotYourSocialWorker@feddit.nu
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        1 year ago

        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…

      • angstylittlecatboy@reddthat.com
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • SIGSEGV@waveform.social
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          1 year ago

          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.

    • GamingChairModel@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • XPost3000@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

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

  • Amphobet@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year 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.

    • CustodialTeapot@lemmy.world
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      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
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        1 year 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 :-)

    • fsxylo@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

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

    • hardypart@feddit.de
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      1 year 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@lemmy.world
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        1 year 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@lemmy.world
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            1 year 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.

  • Jakdracula@lemmy.world
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    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.

    • sixty@sh.itjust.works
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      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

  • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
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    1 year 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.

  • o_oli@lemmy.world
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    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.

  • Hyggyldy@sffa.community
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    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.

  • wosat@lemmy.world
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    I feel like this is the ad-equivalent of the sub-prime mortgage situation, pre-crisis. With mortgages, you had loans that no individual bank or bank manager would want, and then you had an automated process that obfuscated the individual loan details and produced financial products that could be sold as high quality. In the ad world, it’s the same thing. You have these websites that nobody would buy ads from, individually, but somehow, through an automatic process offered by Google and friends, the worthless product becomes valuable.

  • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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    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.