AI Sludge
The Hairpin was a beloved women’s and culture website that spawned brand-name writers like Jia Tolentino and Jazmine Hughes. until it closed in 2018.
But now it comes out nonsensical AI-generated slime after a Serbian DJ-turned-cyberoccupier grabbed the domain when the original owners accidentally let it expire, Wire reports.
Nebojša Vujinović Vujo, the website’s new owner, told Wired in an interview that he had bought The Hairpin domain because it had “a great reputation and excellent backlinks.”
Backlinks are when another site links to your site, and serve as the equivalent of endorsements in the world of search engine optimization (SEO). Having lots of high-quality backlinks improves a website’s ranking when people search for specific content on Google.
Vujo’s move basically turned the website into a clickbait spam site, with useless and scary content like “Dream Interpretation: Dying Parents and Falling Cars” and “Celebrities all have real little teeth under their big false teeth.”
In other words, how the mighty have fallen.
Spam and eggs
Vujo says he’s taken down more than 2,000 websites with the same intent, telling Wired it’s “a common thing on the Internet today.”
Vujo and his acquisition of The Hairpin basically exemplifies everything that is bad and rotten about the internet today: garbage search engine results which are the result of SEO manipulation and the proliferation of Spam content generated by AI.
The problem that arises with these clickbait spam websites is when legitimate ads are displayed alongside spammy AI-generated content, which could be interpreted as a form of fraud. But Vujo is just exploiting an inefficiency that’s out in the open and milking it for all it’s worth.
It’s a sad state of affairs, especially since even legitimate news outlets like Sports Illustrated have been caught publication of content generated by artificial intelligence.
There’s no easy fix for these overlapping problems, but we’re definitely in for a complicated ride online.
Learn more about AI content: Sports Illustrated lays off staff after AI scandal
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