Like it or not, the internet has entered the age of AI-generated content.
With the advent of powerful AI text generators like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the process of optimizing content that can be found on Google, known as search engine optimization (SEO), has been turned upside down.
This is largely due to the ability of these tools to produce content at a much faster rate than human writers, and at a fraction of the cost.
Given the biblical deluge of AI-generated content from the lower platform polluting the internet today, it is clear that everyday Internet users will not benefit.
However, some entrepreneurs are determined to make money by repurposing existing content, washing it through an AI algorithm and passing it off as their own.
“We did an SEO heist that stole 3.6 million total traffic from a competitor.” boast Jake Ward, founder of a UK-based SEO content marketing agency called Content Growth, in a recent X thread.
The ruse was as simple as it was ethically dubious. By stealing a competitor’s sitemap, a file that tells search engines like Google how a website’s content is organized, Ward converted “its list of URLs in article titles” and generated “1,800 articles from those titles at scale using AI.”
Ward’s controversial X-thread caused a lot of anger among users.
“I can’t believe you’re bragging about this,” one user answered.
“And you’re proud of it?” another user he wrote. “Pumping garbage to get to the top of the garbage pile? What about trying to make really good, useful content…oh right, it’s hard.”
It certainly smacks of plagiarism, but unfortunately the law still has a lot of catching up to do. For one thing, proving that AI was used to repurpose content is far from straightforward. AI detectors they are simply not equipped to reliably distinguish between algorithm-generated text and passages written by a human.
Even the maker of ChatGPT OpenAI admitted At the beginning of this year, educators are having no luck when it comes to checking their students’ work for plagiarism.
The AI text generator Ward used for his “heist” is called Byword, a company he founded himself earlier this year that he openly brags about. on your website about an optional feature that allows customers to avoid “AI detection”.
“Enabling this feature will instruct Byword to write in a way that is significantly more difficult for detectors to detect,” the website says. “Byword does this by varying the structure of words and sentences in a different way than other AI content generators, which makes Byword’s content difficult to detect.”
Byword is based on OpenAI’s large GPT-4 language model and offers a variety of pricing tiers to its customers, ranging from $5 per article to $2,499 per month for “unlimited articles” and a “dedicated server”.
The goal is to reduce the effort required to generate content and “spend less time on publishing and more time on strategy,” according to the company’s website.
But it remains to be seen whether the contents he spits out can pass the smell test.
We tested the tool for ourselves, generating a 1,600-word blog post based on the keywords “first exoplanet discovered.” Besides waxing poetic about how “advances in astronomical research have revolutionized our understanding of the universe,” the blog doesn’t actually mention the first exoplanet to be discovered until three-quarters of the way through.
The generated blog also includes a distinctive structure of SEO-friendly headers and sub-headers that unnecessarily break the flow of the blog and seem to exist only to play with Google’s algorithm, rather than to guide the reader.
A separate request to generate an article on the keywords “melting egg” (a message that has already caused much hilarity in Google’s AI-based search) resulted in a salad of familiar words.
The 1,800-word blog titled “The Art of Melting Eggs: A Culinary Delight” goes into excruciating, nonsensical detail about how best to melt eggs for a “fancy breakfast.”
“Unlike traditional methods of cooking eggs, poaching eggs are cooked over very low heat for an extended period of time,” the blog says. It even invites the user to dream of “waking up on a lazy Sunday morning” and treating themselves to some scrambled eggs.
A 1,500-word blog about “investing in Tesla” made no mention of CEO Elon Musk. Given its numerous outbursts that have sent the EV maker’s valuation into a roller coaster ride, it seems like a pretty glaring omission.
We’ve come across many cases of high profile publishers using text generators with less than stellar results. Earlier this year, BuzzFeed landed in hot water after it was caught publishing entire AI-generated articles with awkward language and copy-and-paste phrases.
Other less careful content farms simply forgot to remove the five-word phrase “as an AI language model,” which ChatGPT often uses in their responses.
Some companies are taking the trend to its logical conclusion by poking fun at fully AI-generated writers impersonating humans. Most recently, Futurism discovered that Sports Illustrated was publishing supposedly AI-generated articles by authors who were themselves entirely AI-generated.
But with his “hack,” Ward doesn’t even pretend and treats content creation as nothing more than a numbers game.
Their experiment paints an ominous picture of the current online media landscape, with companies scrambling to find new ways to rank their content in Google search results, cutting into display advertising revenue or sales of affiliates
Given Ward’s success, at least by his own metrics, washing existing content using AI generators is not only effective, but incredibly easy to do.
That any human being who might come across the content at some point would actually benefit from all of this seems entirely beside the point.
In other words, this is not content aimed at human readers, but a deceptive ploy to trick search engines into wasting people’s time.
Learn more about AI content: Sports Illustrated Articles published by fake AI generated writers
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