Junk websites filled with AI-generated text are pulling in money from programmatic ads

"...wasting massive amounts of ad money."

I don't see this as a problem.

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.

Soon the entire internet will just be bots shit posting back and forth.

Oh no :( Won't somebody think of the poor advertisers???

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

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.

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.

Fuck the whole advertising industry

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.

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.

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.

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 irony that this story was posted by a bot…

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.

Sounds like a good gig while it lasts. Half a mind for a weekend project it seems

Some researchers estimate that over 90% of the internet will be filled with A.I. generated content by 2025.

"Junk websites filled with AI-generated text"

And here I thought this was going to be a headline about Reddit.

The fact the ad industry doesn't have people veto the platforms they advertise on is a negative aspect of modern society. I see no issue with this going down. I'm far more lenient to capitalism when they produce sponsorships and financially aid events.

so what's the problem? it's a good thing that ads get served to sites that I don't visit

Just let it burn. The internet has gone to shit anyway.

Keep the Reddit-slamming to appropriate fo--- wait. This is about OTHER junk websites with AI-generated text. Carry on.

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.

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 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.