False AI Obituary Spam The Latest Symptom Of Our Obsession With Mindless Automated Infotainment Engagement
from the that-you-click-is-all-that-matters dept
Last month we noted how deteriorating quality over at Google search and Google news was resulting in both platforms being flooded by AI-generated gibberish and nonsense, with money that should be going to real journalists instead being funneled to a rotating crop of lazy automated engagement farmers.
This collapse of online informational integrity is happening at precisely the same time that U.S. journalism is effectively being lobotomized by a handful of hedge fund brunchlords for whom accurately informing the public has long been a distant afterthought.
It’s a moment in time where the financial incentives all point toward lazy automated ad engagement, and away from pesky things like the truth or public welfare. It costs companies money to implement systems at scale that can help clean up online information pollution, and it’s far more profitable to spend that time and those resources lazily maximizing engagement at any cost. The end result is everywhere you look.
The latest case in point: as hustlebros look to profit from automated engagement bait, The Verge notes that there has been a rise in automated obituary spam.
Like we’ve seen elsewhere in the field of journalism, engagement is all that matters, resulting in a flood of bizarre, automated zero-calorie gibberish where facts, truth, and public welfare simply don’t matter. The result, automated obituaries at unprecedented scale for people who aren’t dead. Like this poor widower, whose death was widely (and incorrectly) reported by dozens of trash automation sites:
“[The obituaries] had this real world impact where at least four people that I know of called [our] mutual friends, and thought that I had died with her, like we had a suicide pact or something,” says Vastag, who for a time was married to Mazur and remained close with her. “It caused extra distress to some of my friends, and that made me really angry.”
Much like the recent complaints over the deteriorating quality of Google News, and the deteriorating quality of Google search, Google sits nestled at the heart of the problem thanks to a refusal to meaningfully invest in combating “obituary scraping”:
“Google has long struggled to contain obituary spam — for years, low-effort SEO-bait websites have simmered in the background and popped to the top of search results after an individual dies. The sites then aggressively monetize the content by loading up pages with intrusive ads and profit when searchers click on results. Now, the widespread availability of generative AI tools appears to be accelerating the deluge of low-quality fake obituaries.”
Yes, managing this kind of flood of automated gibberish is, like content moderation, impossible to tackle perfectly (or anywhere close) at scale. At the same time, all of the financial incentives in the modern engagement infotainment economy point toward prioritizing the embrace of automated engagement bait, as opposed to spending time and resources policing information quality (even using AI).
As journalism collapses and a parade of engagement baiting automation (and rank political propaganda) fills the void, the American public’s head gets increasingly filled with pebbles, pudding, and hate. We’re in desperate need of a paradigm shift away from viewing absolutely everything (even human death) through the MBA lens of maximizing profitability and engagement at boundless scale at any cost.
At some point morals, ethics, and competent leadership in the online information space needs to make an appearance somewhere in the frame in a bid to protect public welfare and even the accurate documentation of history. It’s just decidedly unclear how we bridge the gap.
Filed Under: engagement, google, information, journalism, obituary scraping, obituary spam, public welfare, quality, reporting, search, seo, spam
Comments on “False AI Obituary Spam The Latest Symptom Of Our Obsession With Mindless Automated Infotainment Engagement”
Anyone have a definition of hustlebros? Thanks.
Re: LMGTFY
LMGTFY
Re: Re:
TFGTFM 😂
The web is going the way of Email
As an IT professional, I’ve been online since 1990.
There was a time when email was the ultimate personal contact method, second best to meeting face to face. You could pretty much guarantee that if you didn’t see a bounce error, the person whom you sent your message to was the proud recipient of your efforts.
That time is long gone, as it has been for what we now call snail mail; mobile phones and SMS have gone that way and the web is now not far behind.
The barrier to entry to the web is so low that a substantial proportion of humanity can access it and publish their thoughts and opinions.
With that low barrier comes the ability to spend little or no money and amplify your message beyond what is reasonable in exactly the same way that mail, email, mobile phone and SMS have been flooded with such noise.
The lowest common denominator means everyone, including nefarious users has access and the more widespread the technology and the cheaper it is, the worse it becomes.
This phenomenon is not helped in the slightest by the efforts of the search teams at Google and Microsoft.
I’d go so far as to venture an opinion that Google Search has been in decline for at least a decade, around the time that it retired the”+” search modifier to link that to a now long discontinued product called Google+. Where once Google was the answer to every question, it has for years been feeding poorer and poorer results, noticeable only to subject matter experts, until one day quite recently the general public noticed.
Remove advertising from Google, or make search a public service, because what we’re doing today is killing society in noise.
Re: Non-Anon Comment
Agree 100%. So I’m actually new here, mostly to play my part – as a carbon-based life form. Skynet’s here now, we’re in the middle of a spiritual battle, and most people have no idea. This is but one small battle in a war that is raging, and if more of us don’t do our own small part, it may not fare well.
Over 15 years now with no social media, no cell phone, et. al., and now I’ve come full circle, joining back in, to speak truth in a web of lies. Most places won’t even publish my articles – so I just spun up my own blog. The hope is that I can find a way to get my links in front of the sheeple. Pen’s mightier than the sword, and it’s the truth-tellers that are just starting to figure this out.
A true David & goliath story, and we’re right in the middle of it.
Their product is so shitty now that people are considering Ask Jeeves as their first choice in search.
I suggest that we force every shareholder who demands more value be forced to use Google without the benefit of the addons that we are all running in an attempt to make it much less shitty. With any luck they will lose their stock to ransomware served up with a smile by Google.
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Problem is, there are a lot of shareholders who are 401k and IRA funds. You would need to dig down through that redirection to those people, explain just why you’re forcing them to dog food it, and somehow get them to care.
To The Masses
False announcements that a celebrity died has been a tried-and-true staple of tabloid gossip boards for years. But now, thanks to A.I., ordinary people can read their obituary and giggle with their friends while still alive. Soon, it will be a rite of passage for everyone who turns 75 to have to call up their relatives and assure them that they’re still well and good.
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It’s all fun and games until your pension or SS is terminated. Lets all laugh at George over there being all homeless ‘n stuff. Hardy har har
Re: Re:
Um.
Anyone or any agency that does that based off a ad filled website article and not a death certificate is going to be sued and lose.
Re: Re: Re:
Have you noticed the insanity going on in red states?
I would not be surprised at all to read that such a silly thing happened, especially when ‘AI’ gets involved.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Wait, is that BestNetTech that I see claiming that web sites have moral and ethical obligations beyond exercising their 1st Amendment rights to speak and censor as they wish?
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wait is that a troll who has no life and is obviously is speaking cuase they have nothing else to do
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Is that a child rapist I not seeing the difference between government dictatorship and criticism?
This is, hands down, the most depressing site on the internet, because so rarely does someone get a bucket of “every problem with the US that’s essentially unsolvable and will ruin everything” dumped on their head. It’s true, but holy fuck does this place suck out any little bits of hope I may have had left. How do we even begin to climb the vertical cliff face in front of us?
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Just woke up?
Nice nap.
Yeah, it’s really fucked up out there huh.
Re:
Read Mike’s new year posts.
It’s almost like we have an economy that prioritizes quarterly profits above sustainability.
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But pure, unadulterated capitalism is the best system! Some random internet commenters were very insistent about that.
Re: Re:
The capitalism they know and love is actually made up of two very different constructs. The wealthy and connected enjoy themselves in what can be described as socialism, while the rest of society suffers under austerity.
Neither of which the MSM has been interested in for a long, long time.
Reap what you sow, scumbag journalists, and enjoy going out of business.
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Things are broken, so your solution is to throw them in the trash instead of fixing them?
Re: Re:
MY solution, d-bag, is to directly support independent media, which I do by paying for premium subscriptions to interesting and insightful journalists and commentators like Glenn Greenwald, Tucker Carlson, Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and Alex Jones.
It fills me with glee the thought of regime propaganda outlets like TD, NYT, WaPo and others firing some of their stenographers and not making as much money.
Re: Re: Re:
You are confusing “people who tell tall tales you like” with actual independent journalists.
Information Wants To Be Paid For
People saw the promise of the internet as a way to get a bunch of stuff for free, with other people eating the cost. Perfect, accurate information at your fingertips at no cost.
But why should that be? Why expect that other people will serve you for nothing? So it’s only natural that the internet fills with the equivalent of junk DNA, fragmentized pieces of real and made up information that are nothing but garbage.
In the future, quality information will arrive as it did in the past, from trusted, curated authors who are paid for their work. Or there will be no quality information at all.
Re: Wishful Thinking
Just because you pay for quality doesn’t mean you are going to receive it. Trust itself has proven to be shockingly illusionary when under deeper scrutiny. Just look at how good the ‘old days’ weren’t.
Encyclopedia sets which people paid very well for were shockingly inaccurate, at least enough so that Wikipedia bested them decades ago. East Coast Newspapers flat deliberately suppressed things like the Winter Soldier Investigations, with only the New York Times giving it only a cursory acknowledgement a week later.
Re: Re:
If you think an encyclopedia is inaccurate, pay for a service that will fact check encyclopedias. Don’t expect that someone will do that for you, accurately, for nothing. If you think some stories are underreported, pay for journalists who will report the stories you want, and for journalists who will check their biases. Don’t expect that someone will do that for you, accurately, for nothing.
War crimes are generally a nonsensical concept. They’re either a way for victors to impose extra punishment on losers or for losers to try to stop winners from winning. Soldiers in war will sometimes commit atrocities. That’s the nature of people and of war. Winter Soldier was led by people opposed to the Vietnam war, so of course they wanted to paint a picture of Americans misbehaving.
speaking of the declining quality of Google search, I recently noticed that the
site:operator is no longer reliable. even when I try to get more useful results by restricting the search to a specific site, it now inserts results from other unrelated sites. it’s gonna be really useless when evensite:reddit.comdoesn’t work anymore…Re: I noticed this too!
So I didn’t mess it up, others have noticed too!
I thought maybe I was just using it wrong, as I don’t do searches that way very often anymore, but it’s one of the few things I’ll still go back and use Google search over DuckDuckGo, is the ability to do site: searches. But the last few times I tried it totally sucked! like it mixed in other site’s results AND failed to find content on a site that I KNOW was there! UGGGH
You’d think the ad companies paying these hot garbage sites would have an interest in not paying for low-quality “impressions”.