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https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=64444
Report: Major Media Outlets Partnered With AI Company Are Filling Google With AI-Generated Trash
[...] Major media outlets have reportedly partnered with an AI company called AdVon Commerce to publish tens of thousands of fake product reviews and fill up Google Search results with piles of AI-generated trash.
While sites like InformationLiberation are manually blacklisted by Google's "trusted flaggers" for telling the truth, major media outlets which are manually whitelisted by Google for pushing regime propaganda are given top results for any garbage they publish.
Regime media have been taking advantage of this setup for years with low-quality clickbait but now they're taking spamming/SEO manipulation to a whole new level with AI.
I've suspected for quite some time those diversional "news article" clickbait sites ( like "She thought it was a dog. When the vet saw it, he called the Police! " ) are written by AI, designed to make you fish through myriads of buttons to get the next snippet of story.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Saturday May 11 2024, @03:41PM (4 children)
Those stories, so far, have enough cohesion, and general implicit emotional knowledge, that I suspect they have been written by humans.
I have no doubt there are real people with the ability and amorality to write such things.
It's not the kind of stuff I'm interested in writing.
But they're quite readable, unlike a lot of stuff that was appearing on, say, nanogenmo, a few years ago.
In future, I don't know.
I keep being reminded of the technicians that run the fiction-writing machines in Orwell's 1984.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 11 2024, @04:18PM (1 child)
They were probably written by Anonymous Indians.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Dr Spin on Saturday May 11 2024, @06:07PM
After extensive research (and a considerable quantity of Famous Grouse) - the evidence suggests the acronym means "Actual Idiocy".
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Unixnut on Sunday May 12 2024, @11:59AM (1 child)
Of course there are as this has been an issue before "AI" even existed. Originally it was website owners ripping off the content from other websites and posting it as their own. Even now someone can make a blog about a topic, scrape a bunch of other websites/blogs for content, re-post as their own and use "SEO" to end up the highest link, thereby profiting from the work of others. You can see this in action if you do a search about a news item (e.g. relating to some celebrity scandal) and the first $x websites will be the exact same content copy/pasted. In the end you don't even know who ripped off from whom.
Then you have loads of people paid to write nonsense articles, or even give fake reviews. If you ever wondered what those "Earn $$$ while working from home, flexible hours" spam adverts were about, it was this.
Once I was contacted on whatsapp by such a company, but rather than ignore/block them I went down the rabbit hole to see what I can find. Long story short, if your English is passable you can get a job giving fake 5-star reviews for products, apps and places online (e.g. think Amazon Reviews, Google Play store and Tripadvisor), as well as writing crap filler articles for about $7 an hour. If your English isn't passable they pay you less to sit there and solve captchas all day (and probably do other non-writing tasks like copy/paste articles others wrote into posts).
This was no small company, they had thousands of workers churning this crap out all day long. Thing is, $7 an hour is ~$1213 a month (assuming 8 hour workday, 5 days a week), with flexible work from anywhere in the world. That is a good salary in parts of Eastern Europe, let alone in other poorer parts of the world.
There is no shortage of people who are happy to do this kind of job for that money, hence AI is not even needed. Although I do suspect that AI, rather than replace these cheap workers, will be used to magnify their output to decrease the Signal to Noise ratio even more than it currently is.
It also put into perspective how little use online reviews for anything are anymore. When this is this scale of industrial creation of fake content, pretty much any review you read online can not be trusted. Since I discovered this I no longer pay any attention to reviews of anything.
As such I do my own research as much as possible although quite frankly, I am finding that "the web" is becoming increasingly useless for getting good information about anything.
(Score: 2, Redundant) by drussell on Sunday May 12 2024, @06:34PM
This. 1000x this!!
+1 Touche