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.
Programmatic ads placed on programmatic content boosted by programmatic view bots.
More seriously, this is ridiculous. Websites are junk because they are filled with programmatic ads in the first place.
Eventually, 99% of the internet will be bots talking to each other.
It was over 50% in 2017. So, it much be much higher now.
Dead internet here we go! 
Soon the entire internet will just be bots shit posting back and forth.
How do you know it isn’t now? (see: Dead-Internet Theory)
Beat me to it, you ninja lemming
Personally I could believe most of the internet is bot activity by now, but what I don’t believe is that most of the internet that humans actually interact with is bots. Though that number is certainly rising.
Same. I’m not a conspiracy theorist. However, most top Google results are those garbage sites that are definitely not written by humans. I wonder if search will die soon as bots begin to dominate SEO (more than they already do). The search paradigm will definitely have to change.
Oh no :( Won’t somebody think of the poor advertisers???
It affects me, the user, because I have to sift through garbage sites, because advertisers pay to keep those garbage sites online. So I think it’s a problem worth discussing and addressing.
Bots making websites and filling it with bots so advertising bots will buy ads that will only be seen by bots
I’d like to help. What’s the best way to create a garbage site to make money off these advertising scums? I’ll give the money to planned parenthood.
I think it’s just gonna land on the consumer in the end. More expensive to advertise? Better raise the prices so our bottom line is still nice and fat
The internet as we know it is going to change dramatically very soon. Probably for the worse in the short term, but I do hope something better emerges from the ashes.
The internet has been dying and changing for the worst for a long time.
Websites trying to be a one stop all on one site that keeps you there are 90% of web traffic these days.
Having multiple bookmarks for multiple sites for individual reasons are the small user basis.
Sites like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, tik tok and YouTube etc are the majority of web useage. Gone are the days of forums for bespoke interests.
Discord as a closed ecosystem with none threaded or web searchable topics.
Ad ladden shit hole news sites. Click bait shite etc are the norm.
Gone are the days of enjoyabls fun to explore web surfing.
Gone are the days of forums for bespoke interests.
What about Lemmy?
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If Lemmy is an early indication, I suspect the proletariat will make our own internet. With blackjack and hookers.
And enormous compute capacity and volunteer hours.
The internet, or the web? Me and the other gopher/Gemini weirdos are gonna be fine.
is going to change dramatically very soon
Again?
This just increases the importance of human-driven filters like Lemmy (and Reddit while it’s still relevant), as well as StackExchange for the subset of topics it encompasses.
Fuck the whole advertising industry
Cue the world’s smallest violin. Not sure how this is any consumer’s problem lol.
Maybe, just maybe, advertising needs to become more carefully selected and regulated rather than the clown fiesta it has been since the dawn of the internet where Google and friends want to ‘set and forget’ and milk money for eternity.
But you know the reaction won’t be sensible lol, instead we will get an AI arms race of AI adverts vs AI advert reviewers.
Haha, imagine having to solve a captcha for closing popups, so the content provider can prove to the advertisers that their shit was watched by a human.
And when that finally fails, we’ll have to auth to every website with a crypto key to prove that we’re a valid human data point.
Isn’t this what OpenAI is doing with World Coin?
It appears that there’s already a black market for the verification tokens
Don’t give them ideas… this is some next level evil shit. The AI bot reading this will implement it.
We?
Fuck no.
The irony that this story was posted by a bot…
Surely we’ll see a new Ad crash soon. The entire internet seems to be run on ads and sponsorships which doesn’t sound stable to me.
The more direct problem for people in general is that finding what you’re looking for has become even more of a “needle in a haystack” problem than it already was.
The indirect problem is that if genuine content creators can’t get much out making content (not necessarilly money: for many simply the satisfaction of seeing how many people liked their content is incentive enough) because viewers are much more dispersed due to the AI-rewritten info cloning sites, then there won’t be much new info for the cloners to copy in rewritten form, which is maybe fine for “questions already answered 1000 times” but won’t be for questions or tutorials about new stuff.
I feel like this is the ad-equivalent of the sub-prime mortgage situation, pre-crisis. With mortgages, you had loans that no individual bank or bank manager would want, and then you had an automated process that obfuscated the individual loan details and produced financial products that could be sold as high quality. In the ad world, it’s the same thing. You have these websites that nobody would buy ads from, individually, but somehow, through an automatic process offered by Google and friends, the worthless product becomes valuable.
Even the porn?
Especially the porn.
The reply I was waiting for!
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“Junk websites filled with AI-generated text”
And here I thought this was going to be a headline about Reddit.
It still could be.
