Scammers and spammers use AI SPAM to make money and mess up Google search results
02/05/2024 / By Zoey Sky
Since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022, evidence of artificial intelligence (AI) negatively affecting the internet has been steadily growing.
Dishonest people are using AI spam to make money and create mayhem online. Scammers and spammers have all tried to make money by using AI to quickly create massive quantities of content to reach the top of Google search results.
It’s important to note that this problem doesn’t just affect journalists who get their content stolen or grieving families upset by the digital grave robbery. This is also a huge problem for Google, especially because AI-spamming ends up giving false and “garbage results” to users.
There’s no denying that AI-generated content will radically change the internet, for better or worse. This means companies like Google and the companies making various AI tools must take measures to minimize the actual harm the technology causes to users.
Tech blog targeted by scammers making money on AI-generated pages
404 Media, a new tech blog, announced in January that it had to update its website because of AI spam.
According to a post on the blog, 404 Media writers have noticed that AI-written versions of their articles have been published on spam sites that are “friendly” to search engine optimization (SEO). In some cases, the AI-spun stories have ranked even higher than the original 404 Media articles on Google search results.
The writers also explained that scammers who plagiarized their work, which took weeks or months of painstaking research, are making money by running ads on the AI-generated pages.
404 Media writer Jason Koebler investigated the matter by researching and experimenting with various AI tools that promise to “spin” articles for their users.
One AI tool called SpinRewriter lets users create 1,000 slightly different versions of the same article with one click. It can also be used to automatically publish the articles to several WordPress sites using a paid plugin.
SpinRewriter also offers a tool that lets users manage several websites from a single dashboard.
Jake Ward, co-founder of the company Byword, even bragged about the company’s “SEO heist” that “stole 3.6M total traffic from a competitor” with One Weird Trick, which involved “exporting the competitor’s sitemap and creating AI-generated versions of 1,800 of their articles.”
These AI-generated versions of articles hurt the news business by “stealing” clicks and revenue from the outlets that spend their time and resources doing the actual reporting. (Related: Report: Bad bots TAKING OVER the internet with spam, cybercrime.)
When Koebler tried the Byword app and fed it the URLs of some 404 Media articles, the app quickly generated articles based on them. Although the Byword-spun articles weren’t that good, they were article-shaped and came with AI-generated images.
Koebler explained that after the investigation, 404 Media realized that to fight “the fracturing of social media platforms, a Google discoverability crisis fueled by AI-generated spam and AI-fueled SEO, and a media business environment that is in utter freefall,” their blog needed to be able to reach their readers directly using a platform that they own and control.
To fight spammers, 404 Media has started asking readers for their email addresses. Koebler added that, for now, this is the only way they can make sure that only “real people” access and read their articles.
Indie blog taken over by AI click farmer
In another case of AI spamming, The Hairpin, a popular women’s interest blog from the 2010s, was taken over by an AI click farmer.
While the blog’s iconic post “Women laughing alone with salad” can still be viewed, Edith Zimmerman, the name of the woman who originally wrote it, is still replaced by a man’s fake name.
The Hairpin’s posts were filled with AI-generated content because the domain for “thehairpin.com” was accidentally not renewed by its owners. The domain was instead renewed by someone who buys recently expired domains to turn them into zombie sites that can generate ad revenue.
The Hairpin’s new owner, Nebojsa Vujinovic Vujo, explained that the website is part of his stable of over 2,000 websites. Vujo, a Serbian DJ, admitted that the majority of the new posts on The Hairpin are AI-generated.
According to Vujo, he buys “new websites almost every day.”
Choire Sicha, cofounder of the Awl Network which used to publish The Hairpin, said they have sent a letter to Vujo. Sicha shared that they still don’t know how Vujo was able to access The Hairpin’s content and they’re still trying to find out how this was possible.
Sicha added that Vujo did not purchase The Hairpin, but he did successfully obtain their domain name. However, that does not mean Vujo also owns posts that were previously published on that website.
“Obituary pirates” publish AI-generated obituaries
Spammers are unscrupulous and will even use AI to produce AI-generated obituaries that are full of errors and can harm real people, especially grieving families.
In 2021, before the release of ChatGPT, reports revealed that “obituary pirates” were scraping and copying funeral home websites.
These spammers have adapted and are now using AI for a lucrative tactic which involves creating YouTube videos and spammy websites out of obituaries. They do so by capturing search traffic for people looking for information about the recently deceased.
According to a recent report, these AI-generated YouTube videos have even preyed on a real grieving family. After Matthew Sachman, a college student, died by accidentally falling onto New York subway tracks, YouTube videos and AI-generated articles quickly appeared.
These obituaries were posted after the scammers noted a spike of search interest around the young man’s name and the word “subway.” They took advantage of the tragic accident by plugging in those key terms, instructing AI to write an obituary in a conversational tone and then posting it on a website.
However, because the content was AI-generated, it got most of the details wrong. For example, some of the posts claimed that he was 29 years old when he was 19.
Some posts claimed that Sachman was from Nantucket. And while his family spent summers there, the student was from New York.
Others made an even more shocking and fake claim: that Sachman was stabbed to death in a Bronx subway station.
According to a statement from his family, Sachman and a friend were “fooling around on a platform at the East Broadway stop in Manhattan, when he fell onto the tracks and was killed instantly by a train entering the station.”
However, the wrong details didn’t stop the site from appearing in Google searches.
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