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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<\/a>.<\/p>\n But now it churns out mindless AI-generated slime after a Serbian DJ-turned-cybercrap snagged the domain when the original owners accidentally let it expire. Wire reports<\/a>.<\/p>\n Neboj\u0161a Vujinovi\u0107 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.”<\/p>\n Backlinks are when another site links to your site<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n 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.”<\/p>\n In other words, how the mighty have fallen.<\/p>\n 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.”<\/p>\n Vujo and his acquisition of The Hairpin basically exemplifies everything that is bad and rotten about the internet today: garbage search engine results<\/a> which are the result of SEO manipulation<\/a> and the proliferation of Spam content generated by AI<\/a>.<\/p>\n The problem that arises with these clickbait spam websites is when legitimate ads<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n It’s a sad state of affairs, especially since even legitimate outlets like Sports Illustrated have been caught publishing AI-generated content.<\/p>\n There’s no easy fix for these overlapping problems, but we’re definitely in for a complicated ride online.<\/p>\nSpam and eggs<\/h2>\n