"AI-generated content farms designed to rake in cash are cropping up at an alarming rate"
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.
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