The Internet, once a place where humans posted things.DOUGLAS SACHA
Scammers use AI to spit out web pages and YouTube videos that play Google.
Some of these sites post fake obituaries. Media websites are also being scraped and copied by AI.
The final result: When garbage results flood Googleit’s bad for users and bad for Google.
Just over a year after the public release of ChatGPTwe’re starting to see a prediction of how it could affect the internet come true: AI spam is flooding the web.
Last week, there were three examples of how this played out.
First, 404 Media, a new tech blog, wrote that it had to modify its website due to AI spam.
Recently, it has been noticed that AI-written versions of its first have appeared on SEO-friendly spam sites, sometimes even appearing above the actual articles 404 Media in Google search results. Scammers, of course, are making money by running ads on AI-generated pages.
From 404 MediaItem theft industry look:
Over the past few weeks, Jason has been researching and experimenting with a number of AI tools that promise to “spin” items for their users. One, called SpinRewriter, allows users to create 1,000 slightly different versions of the same article with a single click and automatically publish them to as many WordPress sites as you like using a paid plugin. It also offers a tool that allows users to manage as many websites as they want from a single dashboard.
A the company called Byword cheerfully announces itself the “SEO attack” that “stole 3.6 million total traffic from a competitor” with this weird trick (export the competitor’s sitemap and create AI generated versions of 1,800 of its articles).
These AI-generated versions of articles hurt the news business, effectively stealing clicks (and revenue) from outlets that spend real time and money doing the reporting.
Secondly, With cable wrote that The Hairpin, a popular indie blog in the 2010s, had been taken over by an AI click farmer which left some of the popular articles but replaced the names of the women who wrote them with the names of men —ick.
The story continues
Finally, at the more toxic end of the AI spam spectrum, there are error-filled AI-generated obituaries that cause real pain to grieving families. In 2021, long before ChatGPT, With cable reported that “obituary hackers” were scraping and copying funeral home websites. now they are using AI for a lucrative new tactic of creating YouTube videos and spamming websites out of obits, capturing search traffic for people looking for information about the recently deceased.
The New York Times recently reported on the pain these AI-generated YouTube videos caused a real grieving family. After a college student died after accidentally falling onto the New York subway tracks, YouTube videos and AI-generated articles quickly surfaced.
These obits were in response to scammers noticing an increase in search interest around the young man’s name and the word “subway”. Scammers quickly plugged in those key terms, told the AI to write an obit in a conversational tone, and then posted it on a website, the Times reported. (Most of the details were wrong, but that didn’t stop the site from appearing in Google searches.)
The three examples—404 Media copycats, The Hairpin squatter, and obituary pirates—differ in details. But they have one thing in common: Bad actors, scammers and spammers are trying to make money by using AI to generate massive amounts of content to get to the top of Google search results.
Ultimately, this isn’t just a problem for journalists whose content is stolen or for families who are justifiably upset by the theft of the digital grave. This is a big problem for Google. It ends up delivering garbage results to users, who have more and more of it other attractive options, also thanks to AI, for search.
Google told The New York Times that it was aware of these spam obits and was working to address them (and that it removed some because they violated its policies).
But the bad actors are often one step ahead of the platforms, as is the case with generated AI lewd images of Taylor Swift that proliferated on X last week.
AI will radically change the Internet, for better or for worse. It’s up to Google and the companies that make these AI tools to minimize real harm.
Read the original article at Business Insider
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