AI-generated content farms are the next programmatic ad problem

Content farms enhanced with AI are pumping content onto sites that are drawing advertising spend from over 140 major brands, according to NewsGuard data reported in the MIT Tech Review.

Why it matters

The rise of generative AI promises many benefits, but it also reduces the cost of poor, unreliable content to zero – a tsunami of rubbish for financial gain was largely inevitable. This is bad for users and bad for advertisers, whose ad budgets are now flowing towards poor quality, even potentially harmful content, according to this new study.

What’s going on

MIT Technology Review reports the media researcher NewsGuard’s finding that as many as 140 significant brands are, likely without knowing, spending money on AI-generated news sites, most often through Google.

• To arrive at its estimates, NewsGuard searched for snippets of copy that are typical across text-generating AI systems, such as: “Sorry, I cannot fulfil this prompt.” While Google argues, in the MIT piece, that it maintains strict content quality policies, it appears that the technology is moving too fast for policy.
• It’s a continuation of the content farm trend that has existed on the internet since the rise of programmatic advertising, but generative-AI systems have accelerated their output. The potential for misinformation is huge, with political news and medical advice sites obvious areas for bad actors with AI capabilities to wreak havoc.
• The scale is growing, too. One site studied in the report produces over 1,200 articles each day. NewsGuard says it is discovering roughly 25 new AI-generated sites a week, since it started counting in April.

Key quote

“The opaque nature of programmatic advertising has inadvertently turned major brands into unwitting supporters, unaware that their ad dollars indirectly fund these unreliable AI-generated sites” – Jack Brewster, enterprise editor, NewsGuard, speaking to MIT Technology Review.

Sourced from NewsGuard via MIT Technology Review, WARC