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Re:Markov Chat Bot Disaster Story by Cthulhu_ on Friday July 08, 2022 @05:04AM (#32024633)
I'm pretty confident there's a big "long tail" of the internet that has auto generated blogs like this with some ads on that generate some money. I wonder if Google or whichever ad provider you pick will penalize you for this.

I run a legitimate website with actual people publishing content... sometimes, and I get offers from advertisers for sponsored content. If I didn't earn a living on a day job, auto-generated content farming might be something I'd go into. Morally objectionable, but it's a living.

Secondary would be to just take content from Reddit and add some low effort captions to it, then target old people on Facebook or whatever. Again morally objectionable, but there's a LOT of people who really browse the internet uncritically.

Re:Markov Chat Bot Disaster Story by ep_jhu on Friday July 08, 2022 @06:55AM (#32025446)
The “long tail” you mention reminds me of the “dead internet” conspiracy theory.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/08/dead-...

I wonder if anyone can quantify and keep trends through time of an estimated percentage of auto-generated/bot content, at least for major domains.

Re:Markov Chat Bot Disaster Story by nwsm on Friday July 08, 2022 @05:05PM (#32027095)
I see these a lot, often seeded with exact copies of posts from reddit, stackoverflow, or github issues. I have not seen one that (to my knowledge) was seeded with fake content, but you absolutely could make them.

There is a subreddit called SubSimulatorGPT2 [0] where the author runs GPT2 on 130 subreddits and uploads posts from each of them. I'm subscribed to the subreddit and often get posts from there that I don't realize are fake until something small is off and I check the username.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/comments/btfhks/wh...

Re:Markov Chat Bot Disaster Story by popotamonga on Friday July 08, 2022 @07:29AM (#32025725)
I run one, with ads for betting sites (which give you lifetime earnings for a % of what the person bets). Runs on autopilot basically, generating 80k/yr and growing by 20k every year. Google never penalized me.