The development of technology can also cause all kinds of harm to websites and blogs, if the power of artificial intelligence is used ruthlessly.
American David Bruns recently became the victim of an exceptional, but in the future probably increasingly common, theft.
Instead of having money or other assets stolen from him, Bruns had his website traffic taken.
Bruns runs a website called Exceljet, where he publishes guides and tips related to Microsoft’s Excel spreadsheet program.
Last year, however, the number of visitors to his popular site turned into an inexplicable decline. Earlier this fall, he found out the reason.
The competitor used artificial intelligence aggressively
Bruns discovered that the reason for the drop in visitors was his site’s slump in search engine results.
The culprit turned out to be another site with the same topic, whose administrator had used artificial intelligence in a very questionable way to wedge Bruns ahead of Exceljet in the search results.
Almost all of Exceljet’s articles written in the new format had been published on the competing site.
Instead of being better or better quality than the originals, many were riddled with errors. According to Bruns, even one article referred to a function that cannot be found in Excel at all.
– I started looking at the quality of the articles and noticed that we were losing traffic to stories that had no head and no tail, Bruns said.
The articles were revealed to be written by artificial intelligence. They replaced Exceljet’s articles in the search results because they were search engine optimized to the extreme without caring about errors.
– It’s quite a different thing to come second to an article that is genuinely better than yours than to come second to an article that was written by a machine and that no human has even glanced at, Bruns stated For Business Insider.
What is Search Engine Optimization?
Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to the measures used on websites to improve their search engine visibility. For example, the sites that appear first in Google’s search results are often skillfully and professionally optimized to improve this visibility.
Search engine optimization is a significant part of any website design because it has a real impact on the visibility of the website, but as the case of Bruns and Exceljet shows, not everyone plays a fair game.
Financial benefits with artificial intelligence
With the development and mainstreaming of generative artificial intelligence, abuses related to search engine optimization may become more common.
Using, for example, ChatGPT or another language model, content creators can filter out large numbers of low-quality or variable articles that hide elements and terms that search engines like. If the purpose is only to maximize the clicks the site receives, this tactic is obviously effective, at least for now.
However, according to Bruns, the fact that such tricks work so well is a bad thing for Google.
– If people end up with lousy articles through the top results, they start to question whether Google is doing its job properly.
The author stepped forward
The party that attacked Bruns and Exceljet revealed itself in the messaging service X.
– We succeeded in seizing 3.6 million visitors from our competitor’s website, which offers marketing services to companies Jake Ward ilakoi in X in November.
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In X, Ward also shared detailed instructions on how practically anyone can build a similar capture.
He doesn’t feel he did anything wrong.
– It is extraordinary that something that is acceptable to do once suddenly becomes somehow unethical if it is done on a large scale, Ward was amazed.
He explained how he had fed about 1,800 Exceljet articles into an AI tool that writes search engine optimized content.
Botti had filtered the articles based on the titles of the Exceljet articles, after which Ward published them en masse on his own site, causing traffic to be directed to his site instead of Exceljet.
“Thanks for ruining the internet”
Ward’s stunt has received a mixed reception in X. Although many are excited about the successful capture and plan to try the same themselves with Ward’s instructions, others consider the action unfair.
– I can’t imagine the disappointment my family would experience if I did this kind of work, one stated.
– Thanks for ruining the internet. Please go, ordered another.
– And you’re still proud of this? the third was amazed.
– You make the world a more miserable place.
Sources: Business Insider, Futurism