People once posted things on the Internet. picture alliance / Zoonar | Patrick Daxenbichler
Scammers use AI to spit out websites and YouTube videos that trick Google.
Some of these sites contain fake obituaries. Media websites are also exploited and copied by AI.
The bottom line: When Google is flooded with low-quality results, it’s bad for users – and for Google.
This is a machine translation of an article from our US colleagues at Business Insider. It was automatically translated and checked by an editor.
A little over a year after Chat GPT’s public launch, a prediction about how it could impact the Internet is starting to come true: AI spam is flooding the web. Just last week there were three examples of how this plays out.
First, 404 Media, a new tech blog, wrote about how they had to change their website because of AI spam. Lately, Bolg operators have noticed that AI-written versions of their scoops are showing up on SEO-friendly spam sites – sometimes even above the real “404 Media” articles in Google Search. The fraudsters then make money from the content by placing ads on the AI-generated pages.
This is what “404 Media” writes about the article theft industry:
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These AI-generated versions of articles are hurting the news business because they effectively take clicks (and revenue) away from those who actually spend time and money reporting.
AI bots steal content from other blogs and write obituaries for deceased people
Second, Wired wrote about how The Hairpin, a popular indie blog from the 2010s, was taken over by an AI click farmer that retained some of the popular articles but replaced the names of the women who wrote them with men’s names replaced. Yuck.
The worst example of AI spam is the AI-generated obituaries, which are full of errors and cause a lot of suffering to the grieving families. In 2021, long before Chat GPT, Wired reported that “obituary pirates” were scrounging and copying funeral home websites. Now they are using AI for a new and lucrative tactic by turning the obituaries into YouTube videos and spam websites to receive search queries from 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 student died in a fall on the New York subway, YouTube videos and AI-generated articles quickly appeared.
These AI-generated obituaries were in response to the scammers noticing a spike in search interest around the young man’s name and the word “subway.” The scammers entered those key terms, instructed the AI to write a conversational obituary, and then posted it on a website, the Times reports. (Most of the details were incorrect, but that didn’t stop the site from showing up in Google searches.)
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All three examples – the copycats of “404 Media”, the stealer of “The Hairpin” and the obituary pirates – differ in the details. However, they have one thing in common: bad guys, scammers and spammers try to make money by using artificial intelligence to produce large amounts of content in order to appear at the top of Google search results.
Ultimately, this isn’t just a problem for journalists who have their content stolen, or for grieving families who are rightly dismayed by digital grave robbing. This is a big problem for Google. Ultimately, it only delivers inferior results to users who – thanks in part to AI – increasingly have other attractive search options.
Google told the New York Times that it is aware of these spammy obituaries and is working to eliminate them (and has taken some down because they violate its policies). But the bad actors are often one step ahead of the platforms — like the AI-generated lewd images of Taylor Swift that spread 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 the actual damage.
Read the original article in English here.