Google funds artificial intelligence ‘farms’ with advertising, says consultancy – 7/3/2023 – Market

Websites that present themselves as journalistic, generated by artificial intelligence, are being financed by programmatic advertising, that is, by advertisements directed to them by systems that are also automated.

That’s what the American consultancy NewsGuard came up with, which has been trying to identify “news sites that operate with little or no human supervision and publish articles written largely or completely by robots”. In two months, the list reached 277 of them, “poor quality and unreliable”.

At the same time, in the report “Financing the Next Generation of Content Farms”, NewsGuard found that 393 ads from 141 major brands appeared on at least 55 of these sites.

And that more than 90% of ads had been placed by Google Ads, the largest platform of its kind —which in 2022 generated $168 billion in programmatic advertising.

Asked about the survey, Google Brazil responded that it has “strict policies governing the type of content that can generate revenue” on its advertising platform. “For example, we don’t allow ads to appear with content that has just been copied from other sites.”

“In enforcing these policies, we focus on the quality of the content rather than how it was created,” he added, “and we block or remove ad serving if we detect violations.”

One of the sites with programmatic advertising was the Brazilian noticiasdeemprego.com.br, whose advertisers included a bank and an automaker.

The title of a post there, in English, denounced the program’s error: “Sorry, as an AI language model, I cannot access external links on my own”. It is through messages like this that the consultancy initially identifies the sites.

In the overall report, NewsGuard also avoids identifying advertisers, but describes, among others, “half a dozen banks and financial services companies, four luxury department stores, three appliance manufacturers, two global e-commerce companies, a platform from Silicon Valley and a large European supermarket chain”.

Websites are called content farms due to the intense production of articles, making room for ads. One adds an average of 1,200 posts a day. In the assessment of the consultancy, “the creation of these sites generated by AI is thus encouraged”.

They are not necessarily foci of misinformation, but there are cases of advertisements published on websites with promises, for example, to teach “how to avoid cancer naturally”.

For Steven Brill, co-founder and CEO of NewsGuard, “this new wave of AI-powered websites will make it even more difficult for consumers to know who is providing them with news, further reducing trust”, one of the problems in the sector accentuated by advances in technology.

In the general survey, there was no lack of cases even of “hallucination”, as observed since the launch of ChatGPT, seven months ago. One of them, celebritiesdeaths.com, reported in headlines about the US president and vice president: “Biden is dead. Harris is acting president. Pronouncement at 9 am.”