The majority of the sites appear to be content farms — low-quality websites run by anonymous sources that churn-out posts to bring in advertising. The websites are based all over the world and are published in several languages, including English, Portuguese, Tagalog and Thai, NewsGuard said in its report. A handful of sites generated some revenue by advertising “guest posting” — in which people can order up mentions of their business on the websites for a fee to help their search ranking. Others appeared to attempt to build an audience on social media, such as ScoopEarth.com, which publishes celebrity biographies and whose related Facebook page has a following of 124,000. More than half the sites make money by running programmatic ads — where space for ads on the sites are bought and sold automatically using algorithms. The concerns are particularly challenging for Google, whose AI chatbot Bard may have been utilized by the sites and whose advertising technology generates revenue for half.
Source: AI Chatbots Have Been Used to Create Dozens of News Content Farms – Bloomberg
