AI is filling up the internet with garbage spam sites

A new wave of artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT and Google Bard may or may not change the way humans interact with technology forever. But before it does that, it’s going to make the internet even more annoying. According to a new report, AI is being used to generate a huge amount of websites filled with random, garbage strings of text targeted at search engines, then plastered with advertising to generate revenue.

NewsGuard reports that AI text generation tools are being combined with software that auto-generates new sites, creating masses of domains filled with a huge amount of text. The sites are then filled with programmatic advertising slots, which serve up real ads over the fake content. It could be argued that the process is fraud, since advertisers are paying for ads in good faith that’s presumably written by humans. The combination of largely automatic advertising systems and websites that can be generated by the dozen with few clicks is creating a feedback loop, where AI-generated content with practically zero human input is being financed by advertising algorithms so vast and complex that barely any humans understand them.

AI-generated text can be difficult to distinguish from merely generic or bad writing — after all, filling up sites with low-quality content and selling advertising on top of it is hardly a new practice. To solve this problem, NewsGuard searched for telltale phrases that AI systems sometime return for queries, such as “Sorry, as an AI language model, I am not able to access external links or websites on my own.” That phrase was spotted in a headline for a jobs site…that was supposed to be Brazilian in origin. All in all, the investigation found over 200 “news” sites generated with AI text, one of which was publishing more than 1,200 new articles every day. And these were just the ones that were easily spotted with error messages.

Not every single one of these sites was serving advertisements, but over a quarter were, with 141 major brands paying for ads over garbage content. Major banks, sports clothing vendors, broadband providers, and streaming services are serving up ads aimed at web users in the US, Germany, France, and Italy, four of the most lucrative markets for web advertising. That likely means that the creators are getting enough revenue to justify their efforts, even if the majority of the sites and content generated are duds.

With AI being used to create everything from novels sold on Amazon, to fake political ads, to bogus legal citations used in a very real courtroom, it’s clear that easy access to massive amounts of auto-generated text and images is a growing problem.