Are we entering the age of AI Clickbait Kingpins?
An interview with WIRED’s Kate Knibbs on a weird part of the internet
Over the past several months you may have noticed a new sort of piece on your favourite tech or media website: the AI sludge story.
They delve into weird corners of the internet, where shady characters sometimes make hundreds of thousands of dollars through quirks in the way that articles on the internet are distributed and how those articles receive attention – and money.
One of the first examples was from late last year when Jake Ward, an Search Engine Optimization specialist, bragged about pulling off an “SEO Heist” where he used generative AI to programmatically create thousands of articles based off of a competitors headlines. He would post the articles on his client’s site and then watch as it sucked up search engine traffic and brought thousands and thousands of eyeballs.
Another mentioned AI-generated articles appearing in ‘news’ search results or AI-generated “obituary spam” about individuals who were in fact, not dead.
Perhaps one of the most intriguing was “Confessions of an AI Clickbait Kingpin” from WIRED about a Serbian DJ and entrepreneur named Vujo who buys up old websites and is now using AI-generated articles to suck up SEO clicks from search engines, amassing what he says is hundreds of thousands of dollars for some sites. Christopher, Overtone’s CPO, sat down with WIRED reporter Kate Knibbs this week, and you can read the interview below.
Are we entering the age of AI Clickbait Kingpins?
But these stories also point to one of the reasons that Overtone was founded, to redefine how value is measured online beyond just clicks and shares. Generative AI has made this harder (but also more worthwhile), and we risk losing some of what is human about being online if we can’t catch up with it.
It also pinpoints how using fine-tuned AI language models like Overtone’s can be beneficial for dealing with the scale of some of these issues.
On the Wired piece, for example, one of the sites that Vujo bought was The Frisky, which used to be a popular women’s entertainment site in the early 2010s, the golden age of witty, sometimes snarky, opinionated blogs like Gawker. We ran hundreds of articles from both the old Frisky and the new Frisky, post-Vujo acquisition, and you can see the difference. The old site had typical pieces like “This Thanksgiving, Eat Whatever You Goddamn Want” by Lauren Duca, a real person writing a takedown about diet advice in women’s magazines. If not Pulitzer-winning work, it was more considered than the new site which publishes fluffy low-depth “hot take” pieces like “Why Escorts Are the Perfect Companions for a Night Out” or “Dental implants – What you need to know before getting one.” As Knibbs mentions in her interview, it seems like the pieces are “not really intended to be read at all” but just suck up search traffic. If you wanted to know when a site became something like this, you would either need to monitor it manually or use something like Overtone AI signals to understand when the site became something unrecognisable that you may want to stay away from.
Or take the SEO Heist Guy, who generated thousands of articles for the website of a financial planning tool. More than 90% of these generated articles were low-depth filler, which would be easy for an AI system like Overtone to detect and have advertisers or monitors pass over. Even if it is a corporate blog, it is particularly lacking in substance with pieces rambling explanations of Excel functions or “Agile CRM vs Zendesk Sell”. By comparison, take the blog of a company like Rakuten that publishes something like “How AI is changing creativity: A physicist weighs in”. While it is definitely in the business of promoting Rakuten, it is offering something that is meant to be read by a human.
That question of being “meant for humans” is ultimately one of the biggest and thorniest issues to tackle as the internet fills up with the flood of content. It points to how the current systems of moving articles online are focused almost entirely on impressions, clicks and shares. AI for reading can create a different way of looking at things.
Overtone Press
Overtone’s CEO Philip Allin sat down with the newsletter Quo Vadis from Tom Triscari to talk about the problems we are tackling including “Made for Advertising” sites.
Overtone Events
Philip will be at the Mobile World Congress next week in Barcelona, as well as at the 4 Years From Now side event.
In the world of publishing Reagan will be at the International Symposium on Online Journalism in Austin and Overtone will be participating in the MediaTech Festival in Odense, Denmark.
We will also be presenting at Tech Day for the media intelligence association FIBEP in April in London.