Junk websites filled with AI-generated text are pulling in money from programmatic ads::More than 140 brands are advertising on low-quality content farm sites —and the problem is growing fast.

    • phillaholic@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      And our time. I’m sick of googling something and getting nothing out these fluff pieces with little or no real information. It’s made Google near useless for entire subjects. Try searching for troubleshooting on anything Apple for example.

      • FredericChopin_@feddit.uk
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        1 year ago

        Yeah it’s even shit for dumb searches.

        Decided to Google the most popular SUVs and I get a top 10 article where it expects me to click through each one so it can load a new page and ads for each item in the list.

        Then you get the news tab in edge, msn news maybe and half the ads are literal scams.

        • phillaholic@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          1 year ago

          The latter is infuriating to me. If I’m actually searching for a product, by all means show me an ad for the type of product I’m looking for. That’s a win-win scenario. How these mainstream sites put up literal scam ads I don’t understand. How can they be paying better than Ford?

          • jballs@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            We’ve come full circle. Original web searches sucked because you couldn’t trust the results to be ranked in a useful way. You could search for a historical fact and you were just as likely to get an 8th grader’s homework they posted online instead of a credible source. Then Google came along and solved that problem with their magic algorithm. Only took them a little more than 20 years to get to the point where their algorithm now sucks so bad that we’re back to where we started. But instead of an 8th graders homework, we get AI articles that appear to be trained from said homework. Fascinating.

  • XPost3000@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

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

      • jecxjo@midwest.social
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        When the sites are bot built like the ones described here its just a matter of Large Numbers. Create a thousand permutations of porhub and if they all only get a few thousand views a day in total you’ve made some money.

  • Hyperi0n@lemmy.film
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Asafum@feddit.nl
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      This is why I’m upset when I see everyone talking about leaving reddit and deleting their history.

      I don’t even search for things without “reddit” in the search terms because literally every site is garbage now and everything that shows up in the first page or two of Google is just SEO boosted garbage.

  • Meowoem@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    1 year ago

    It’s been this way for ages, though it was mechanical Turk created text and stolen content.

    I don’t really mind adverts, like when I see a creator I like doing a raid shadow legends bit I’m happy to see that they’re making money from a shitty game rather than me having to pay.

    And I know the established wisdom is that they track everything you do and say but honestly half my adverts are for things that make no sense to me like tampons and investment services, I really think them saying how well they know the user is just to get a advertiser money and isn’t really as true as we fear. Not that I think it’s a good thing but it’s so trivial compared to everything else happening in the world Iv don’t really care