<https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/06/26/1075504/junk-websites-filled-with-ai-generated-text-are-pulling-in-money-from-programmatic-ads/>
More than 140 brands are advertising on low-quality content farm
sites—and the problem is growing fast.
People are using AI chatbots to fill junk websites with AI-generated
text that attracts paying advertisers, according to a new report from
the media research organization NewsGuard that was shared exclusively
with MIT Technology Review.
Over 140 major brands are paying for ads that end up on unreliable
AI-written sites, likely without their knowledge. Ninety percent of the
ads from major brands found on these AI-generated news sites were served
by Google, though the company’s own policies prohibit sites from placing
Google-served ads on pages that include “spammy automatically generated
content.” The practice threatens to hasten the arrival of a glitchy,
spammy internet that is overrun by AI-generated content, as well as
wasting massive amounts of ad money.
Most companies that advertise online automatically bid on spots to run
those ads through a practice called “programmatic advertising.”
Algorithms place ads on various websites according to complex
calculations that optimize the number of eyeballs an ad might attract
from the company’s target audience. As a result, big brands end up
paying for ad placements on websites that they may have never heard of
before, with little to no human oversight.
To take advantage, content farms have sprung up where low-paid humans
churn out low-quality content to attract ad revenue. These types of
websites already have a name: “made for advertising” sites. They use
tactics such as clickbait, autoplay videos, and pop-up ads to squeeze as
much money as possible out of advertisers. In a recent survey, the
Association of National Advertisers found that 21% of ad impressions in
their sample went to made-for-advertising sites. The group estimated
that around $13 billion is wasted globally on these sites each year.
Now, generative AI offers a new way to automate the content farm process
and spin up more junk sites with less effort, resulting in what
NewsGuard calls “unreliable artificial intelligence–generated news
websites.” One site flagged by NewsGuard produced more than 1,200
articles a day.
Some of these new sites are more sophisticated and convincing than
others, with AI-generated photos and bios of fake authors. And the
problem is growing rapidly. NewsGuard, which evaluates the quality of
websites across the internet, says it’s discovering around 25 new
AI-generated sites each week. It’s found 217 of them in 13 languages
since it started tracking the phenomenon in April.
NewsGuard has a clever way to identify these junk AI-written websites.
Because many of them are also created without human oversight, they are
often riddled with error messages typical of generative AI systems. For
example, one site called CountyLocalNews.com had messages like “Sorry, I
cannot fulfill this prompt as it goes against ethical and moral
principles … As an AI language model, it is my responsibility to
provide factual and trustworthy information.”
NewsGuard’s AI looks for these snippets of text on the websites, and
then a human analyst reviews them.
Making money from junk
“It appears that programmatic advertising is the main revenue source for
these AI-generated websites,” says Lorenzo Arvanitis, an analyst at
NewGuard who has been tracking AI-generated web content. “We have
identified hundreds of Fortune 500 companies and well-known, prominent
brands that are advertising on these sites and that are unwittingly
supporting it.”
“This is not normal. This is not healthy.”
MIT Technology Review looked at the list of almost 400 individual ads
from over 140 major brands that NewsGuard identified on the AI-generated
sites that served programmatic ads, which included companies from many
different industries including finance, retail, auto, health care, and
e-commerce. The average cost of a programmatic ad was $1.21 per thousand
impressions as of January 2023, and brands often don’t review all the
automatic placements of their advertisements, even though they cost money.
Google’s programmatic ad product, called Google Ads, is the largest
exchange and made $168 billion in advertising revenue last year. The
company has come under criticism for serving ads on content farms in the
past, even though its own policies prohibit sites from placing
Google-served ads on pages with “spammy automatically generated
content.” Around a quarter of the sites flagged by NewsGuard featured
programmatic ads from major brands. Of the 393 ads from big brands found
on AI-generated sites, 356 were served by Google.
“We have strict policies that govern the type of content that can
monetize on our platform,” Michael Aciman, a policy communications
manager for Google, told MIT Technology Review in an email. “For
example, we don’t allow ads to run alongside harmful content, spammy or
low-value content, or content that’s been solely copied from other
sites. When enforcing these policies, we focus on the quality of the
content rather than how it was created, and we block or remove ads from
serving if we detect violations.”
Most ad exchanges and platforms already have policies against serving
ads on content farms, yet they “do not appear to uniformly enforce these
policies,” and “many of these ad exchanges continue to serve ads on
[made-for-advertising] sites even if they appear to be in violation of …
quality policies,” says Krzysztof Franaszek, founder of Adalytics, a
digital forensics and ad verification company.
Google said that the presence of AI-generated content on a page is not
an inherent violation. “We also recognize that bad actors are always
shifting their approach and may leverage technology, such as generative
AI, to circumvent our policies and enforcement systems,” said Aciman.
A new generation of misinformation sites
NewsGuard says that most of the AI-generated sites are considered “low
quality” but “do not spread misinformation.” But the economic dynamic of
content farms already incentivizes the creation of clickbaity websites
that are often riddled with junk and misinformation, and now that AIs
can do the same thing on a bigger scale, it threatens to exacerbate the
misinformation problem.
For example, one AI-written site, MedicalOutline.com, had articles that
spread harmful health misinformation with headlines like “Can lemon cure
skin allergy?” “What are 5 natural remedies for ADHD?” and “How can you
prevent cancer naturally?” According to NewsGuard, advertisements from
nine major brands, including the bank Citigroup, the automaker Subaru,
and the wellness company GNC, were placed on the site. Those ads were
served via Google.
Adalytics confirmed to MIT Technology Review that ads on Medical Outline
appeared to be placed via Google as of June 24. We reached out to
Medical Outline, Citigroup, Subaru, and GNC for comment over the
weekend, but the brands have not yet replied.
After MIT Technology Review flagged the ads on Medical Outline and other
sites to Google, Aciman said Google had removed ads that were being
served on many of the sites “due to pervasive policy violations.” The
ads were still visible on Medical Outline as of June 25.
“NewsGuard's findings shed light on the concerning relationship between
Google, ad tech companies, and the emergence of a new generation of
misinformation sites masquerading as news sites and content farms made
possible by AI,” says Jack Brewster, the enterprise editor of NewsGuard.
“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."
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Catching bad content in the age of AI
Why haven’t tech companies improved at content moderation?
Franaszek says it’s still too early to tell how the AI-generated content
will affect the programmatic advertising landscape. After all, in order
for those sites to make money, they still need to attract humans to
their content, and it’s currently not clear whether generative AI will
make that easier. Some sites might draw in only a couple of thousand
views each month, making just a few dollars.
“The cost of content generation is likely less than 5% of the total cost
of running a [made-for-advertising] site, and replacing low-cost foreign
labor with an AI is unlikely to significantly change this situation,”
says Franaszek.
So far, there aren’t any easy solutions, especially given that
advertising props up the entire economic model of the internet. “What is
key to remember is that programmatic ads—and targeted ads more
generally—are a fundamental enabler of the internet economy,” says Hodan
Omaar, senior AI policy advisor at the Information Technology and
Innovation Foundation, a think tank in Washington, DC.
“If policymakers banned the use of these types of ad services, consumers
would face a radically different internet: more ads that are less
relevant, lower-quality online content and services, and more paywalls,”
Omaar says.
“Policy shouldn’t be focused on getting rid of programmatic ads
altogether, but rather on how to ensure there are more robust mechanisms
in place to catch the spread of misinformation, whether it be direct or
indirect.”
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