Prominent international brands are unintentionally funding low-quality AI content platforms. Major banks, consumer tech companies, and a Silicon Valley platform are some of the key contributors. Their advertising efforts indirectly fund these platforms, which mainly rely on programmatic advertising revenue.
- NewsGuard identified hundreds of Fortune 500 companies unknowingly advertising on these sites.
- The financial support from these companies boosts the financial incentive of low-quality AI content creators.
Emergence of AI Content Farms: AI tools are making it easier to set up and fill websites with massive amounts of content. OpenAI’s ChatGPT is a tool used to generate text on a large scale, which has contributed to the rise of these low-quality content farms.
- The scale of these operations is significant, with some websites generating hundreds of articles a day.
- The low quality and potential for misinformation does not deter these operations, and the ads from legitimate companies could lend undeserved credibility.
Google’s Role: Google and its advertising arm play a crucial role in the viability of the AI spam business model. Over 90% of ads on these low-quality websites were served by Google Ads, which indicates a problem in Google’s ad policy enforcement.
PS: I run a ML-powered news aggregator that summarizes with an AI the best tech news from 50+ media (TheVerge, TechCrunch…). If you liked this analysis, you’ll love the content you’ll receive from this tool!
Yes - LLMs generate content, bots “consume” it. Site owner gets $ for ad traffic.
There’s a cool episode on that topic from Malicious Life podcast - called “Ad Fraud” or link.
Genius!