Google Made Me Ruin A Perfectly Good Website: A Case Study On The AI-Generated Internet

theluddite@lemmy.ml to Technology@lemmy.ml – 97 points –
theluddite.org
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TLDR: dude applied for AdSense, adsense said he didn't have enough content, he used a large language model to generate content. And he got approved for AdSense cuz he had enough content

I am the dude. Fair enough, but your summary misses the point. The original website was a useful tool that people use, but it didn't qualify for adsense. I draw an analogy to recipes. Recipe sites used to be useful, but now you have to scroll through tons of blogspam to even get to the recipe. Google has a monopoly on ads, and like it or not, ad revenue is how people who make websites get paid. Google's policies for what qualifies for AdSense have a huge impact on the internet.

The point of the post is to show how direct that relationship is, using an existing and useful website.

Years ago Google decided that the bigger a site was, the better. This is a ridiculous metric and has resulted in irrelevant bullshit, no offense, clogging the internet.

Hi Mr dude! Good article. I was just providing a TLDR since the title was a little nebulous and I'm sure some people aren't going to click through unless they get enticed. Sorry for missing the main theme.

Just wait. Some asshole Google employee will read his blog, and unapprove him.

Rule one of generated content club is don't talk about generated content club. It's hard to prove somebody generated all the articles. But if they admit to it in an article you got them

The point of the post is to talk about it because I care about the internet and don't want it to be filled with generated trash.

Honestly, good on you! I admire hat you are openly talking about this even tho you risk demonetization.

Don't be too impressed. So far I've only taken in a couple bucks.

But seriously, that's why I do The Luddite. There are some good tech journalists and commentators, but they're usually professional journalists or opinion-havers. I code for a living. I think that perspective is often missing. How many people who write about the app store have actually submitted an app? Or like this post, how many have made and then monetized a website?

This post itself kind of reads like that, though. You could easily cut it to a third of its current length and not lose anything.

I can't say I agree. I think it had the right length.

I feel like there's an happy ending here with just one more step: Removing all the bullshit content and adsense not noticing.

Given this trend, GPT 5 or 6 will be trained on a majority of content from its previous versions, modeling them instead of the expect full range of language. Researchers have already tested the outcome of a model-in-loop with pictures, it was not pretty.

Yeah absolutely. The Luddite had a guest write in and suggest that if anxiety is the self turned inwards,nthe internet is going to be full of increasingly anxious LLMs in a few years. I really liked that way of putting it.