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posted by chromas on Thursday July 04 2019, @01:28AM   Printer-friendly
from the This-is-important-information-if-you-or-your-loved-one-is-different-from-pondering-your-boat-engine dept.

Endless AI-generated spam risks clogging up Google's search results

Over the past year, AI systems have made huge strides in their ability to generate convincing text, churning out everything from song lyrics to short stories. Experts have warned that these tools could be used to spread political disinformation, but there's another target that's equally plausible and potentially more lucrative: gaming Google.

Instead of being used to create fake news, AI could churn out infinite blogs, websites, and marketing spam. The content would be cheap to produce and stuffed full of relevant keywords. But like most AI-generated text, it would only have surface meaning, with little correspondence to the real world. It would be the information equivalent of empty calories, but still potentially difficult for a search engine to distinguish from the real thing.

Just take a look at this blog post answering the question: "What Photo Filters are Best for Instagram Marketing?" At first glance it seems legitimate, with a bland introduction followed by quotes from various marketing types. But read a little more closely and you realize it references magazines, people, and — crucially — Instagram filters that don't exist:

You might not think that a mumford brush would be a good filter for an Insta story. Not so, said Amy Freeborn, the director of communications at National Recording Technician magazine. Freeborn's picks include Finder (a blue stripe that makes her account look like an older block of pixels), Plus and Cartwheel (which she says makes your picture look like a topographical map of a town.

The rest of the site is full of similar posts, covering topics like "How to Write Clickbait Headlines" and "Why is Content Strategy Important?" But every post is AI-generated, right down to the authors' profile pictures. It's all the creation of content marketing agency Fractl, who says it's a demonstration of the "massive implications" AI text generation has for the business of search engine optimization, or SEO.

"Because [AI systems] enable content creation at essentially unlimited scale, and content that humans and search engines alike will have difficulty discerning [...] we feel it is an incredibly important topic with far too little discussion currently," Fractl partner Kristin Tynski tells The Verge.

[...] The key question, then, is: can we reliably detect AI-generated text? Rowan Zellers of the Allen Institute for AI says the answer is a firm "yes," at least for now. Zellers and his colleagues were responsible for creating Grover, the tool Fractl used for its fake blog posts, and were able to also engineer a system that can spot Grover-generated text with 92 percent accuracy.

"We're a pretty long way away from AI being able to generate whole news articles that are undetectable," Zellers tells The Verge. "So right now, in my mind, is the perfect opportunity for researchers to study this problem, because it's not totally dangerous."

Spotting fake AI text isn't too hard, says Zellers, because it has a number of linguistic and grammatical tells. He gives the example of AI's tendency to re-use certain phrases and nouns. "They repeat things ... because it's safer to do that rather than inventing a new entity," says Zellers. It's like a child learning to speak; trotting out the same words and phrases over and over, without considering the diminishing returns.


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by SomeGuy on Thursday July 04 2019, @01:41PM (2 children)

    by SomeGuy (5632) on Thursday July 04 2019, @01:41PM (#863117)

    The entire Internet has devolved in to spam.

    I do a search for some random search term blah and a huge portion of the time I get shit like: "Fix errors with blah!", "Shop online for Blah!", "Items that include Blah", "Blah trivia!", "Revolvy quizzes about Blah!".

    If I am lucky, what I want is on page 153 of the search results, but even most "legitimate" sites will open with a popover asking me to sign up for their newsletter, then another asking me to fill out a survey, then another telling me I need to disable my pop-up blocker and virus scanner and keep my pants down so they can rape my butt, then the content loads but there is a floating "talk to a live representative" window floating at the bottom, a large "feedback" tab floating at the side, animated menus at the top that randomly disappears/reappears as I move the mouse around, the "content" starts with a totally unrelated auto playing full-motion video carousel, I have to scroll down past some actual ads, and then I finally see the 2k bytes of text content I actually wanted to read. As I scroll to the end the page auto-grows with unrelated clickbait.

    And on a good day, if I click on a link, it recognizes my browser user agent as being non-standard or I failed to load a magic tracking pixel or something, so it think I am trying to D.O.S them and they block any further access.

    On a bad day, I find the content is actually on Facebook and they want me to create an account an suck Zuckerberg's shlong just to see it.

    As for forum spam, this is nothing new. I had been on some forum more than 10 years ago where there were endless meaningless threads in broken English along the lines of "the url of your site, is it import?". I guess any moderators didn't remove it because the forum was somewhat about web stuff and they wanted to be "polite" to non English speakers.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +2  
       Interesting=1, Informative=1, Total=2
    Extra 'Informative' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   4  
  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @10:04PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @10:04PM (#863254)

    Tell me about it!

    I've been having a helluva time just trying to find a set of tires for my van. I need the LT load rated "E". No one seems to understand why I visited their site...and NAPA,... I am looking right at you...I am envious of your skill at finding employers that pay for making websites so inaccessible for those of us that hate being tracked so much. Don't worry, I am not going to Sears. I used to go there, but they got too big too. When one gets that big, the customer is the least important part of the marketing mix. Some small guy on the net will make the sale, while the big guy basks in his terms and conditions, and his need that I use some specific browser.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 05 2019, @02:46AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 05 2019, @02:46AM (#863329)

      TireRack has a lot of tires, but I've had crap luck with their site -- much better to telephone them and talk to someone.

      I wanted to find out the smallest rim diameter that would fit my car (which came with tires that had stupid-short-sidewalls, and rim damage on potholes). Guy on the phone had the answer and also told me the correct size tire that would give nearly the same roll-out (circumference) as the original tires.