AI Trash: Major online brands are pumping millions into AI-generated junk content

The internet is filled not only with substandard, trashy content but also with content that is misleading, contains misinformation, or is completely false. In the past year, the rise of generative AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard has contributed to the overwhelming volume of AI-generated news and online information. The Internet is filling up with AI-generated trash A recent analysis conducted by NewsGuard, a company that assigns trust ratings to online news sources, reveals that major global brands, including tech giants and banks, are financially supporting the spread of sub-par AI-generated content through advertising. These advertisements seem to be generated automatically, meaning the brands may not actively choose to advertise on the websites that are labelled as “unreliable AI-generated news and information websites or UAINs.” According to NewsGuard, Google is responsible for placing the majority of these ads, but they fail to protect the brand safety of the companies involved. Legitimate companies generally do not want their advertisements to appear on sites that promote fake news, misinformation, or low-quality content. The company’s analysts have identified 217 sites on its UAIN site tracker, many of which rely heavily on advertising for financial support. New money-minting schemes Due to the opportunity to earn revenue through programmatic advertising, these websites are motivated to publish content frequently. One such unreliable AI-generated UAIN identified by NewsGuard is a website called “world-today-news.com,” which published approximately 8,600 articles during the week of June 9 to June 15 this year. That’s around 1,200 articles on average per day. To put this into perspective, a typical digital newsroom publishes approximately 150-200 articles per day with a considerably larger staff. NewsGuard said that the brands advertising with UAINs includes six major banks and financial-services firms, four luxury department stores, three leading sports apparel brands, three appliance manufacturers, two of the largest consumer technology companies globally, two global e-commerce companies, two US broadband providers, three streaming services, a digital platform based in Silicon Valley, and a major European supermarket chain. According to NewsGuard, many brands and advertising agencies have “exclusion lists” that prevent their advertisements from appearing on undesirable websites. However, these lists are not always kept up to date, leading to advertisements still being displayed on such sites. Google is aware of the problem, but not willing to take actions NewsGuard says they reached out to Google multiple times regarding its monetization of unreliable AI-generated news and information (UIAN) sites. Google requested additional context via email, but after receiving the additional information on June 25, Google has not responded further, says NewsGuard. Google’s advertising policies are designed to prevent sites with “spammy automatically-generated content” from displaying ads served by Google. This includes AI-generated content that lacks originality or sufficient value. During their recent research conducted between May and June of this year, NewsGuard analysts discovered a total of 393 programmatic ads from 141 prominent brands displayed on 55 out of the 217 UAIN sites. The analysts examined these websites from the United States, Germany, France, and Italy. Surprisingly, over 90 per cent of these advertisements were served through Google Ads, a platform that generates billions of dollars in revenue for Google annually. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News , India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook_,_  Twitter and  Instagram_._