It is reported that there are more than 200 "junk websites" that generate content by AI to defraud advertising subsidies.
CTOnews.com, June 28 (Xinhua) with the low cost of generative AI, more and more "junk websites" that use crawlers to crawl other website content and regenerate information with AI continue to emerge. Foreign media NewsGuard has released a relevant data report, saying that more than 200 such "junk websites" have been tracked so far.
It is reported that NewsGuard began to mark these sites that use AI to generate content at the beginning of this year. In April this year, they registered 49 related sites, and by June, they had more than 200. these "AI dumps" lack human supervision, and the messages are mixed and do not have any credibility, all for the purpose of picking wool from Google Ads.
According to the ▲ Image Source NewsGuard survey, these "spam sites" exist to induce users to click and make money from the ads displayed in them. The site, called TNN, even generates more than 1200 articles a day, which is completely controlled by crawlers and "rewrite after changing grammar" AI scripts, compared with an average of 150 articles a day on the New York Times website.
▲ diagram source NewsGuard
▲ Source NewsGuard as of June 26, AI "spam sites" have tracked 277 sites in 13 languages, including Chinese, English, Arabic, Czech, Dutch, French, Indonesian, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Tagalog (Philippines), Thai and Turkish.
CTOnews.com notes that, in fact, sites that use crawlers to crawl other media information in batches, add a large number of ads to the crawled information pages, and attract visitors through "competitive ranking" to get advertising subsidies have been quite common before the advent of AI, while the popularity of generative AI only gives these sites lower operating costs.
Tu Yuan Pexels and Google's advertising policy makes it clear that Google Ads API is not allowed in automatically generated content site articles, but these sites actually have 3-5 advertising links per news page, so it actually violates Google's advertising policy.
