'👾04' Fake writer fools search engine
I was on Discord trying to make a reference to Nina from Full Metal Alchemist, but I had forgotten her name. As I was searching for it I stumbled across something much more disturbing on multiple levels. I use searxng, which is a privacy focused search engine aggregator because I don't need prying eyes wondering why I look up random thoughts that pop into my head. For some odd reason, the privacy focused engines like DuckDuckGo and Brave don’t play nice with searxng… Keep that in mind next time you see one of their advertisements.
Nonetheless, I wanted a brief answer without opinion and exposition. I just wanted a fast fact, so I could add the Nina to my reference and seem smart and witty. I skipped the "mainstream" sites and for reference here is why:
If we measure screen real estate, I’d be willing to bet the advertisements take up more space than the actual content. I just wanted a name. I didn't need to know that our good friends at this fandom are talking about One Piece soon. So I scrolled past the first 5 results and I something caught my eye.
Here we are. Exactly what I'm looking for. The description is a little weird with two dates, but the answer is in the description. However, the web address has nothing to do with anime, which piqued my interest so I clicked.
The moment you click on the link this person's face--Hubert Drew's face--is staring right at you. Something feels off, but I read on. The post's content is weird:
Points 2 and 3 are the exact same and the sidebar is about the "author" who loves dogs and talks about the challenges of dog ownership... Last I checked, transmutation and alchemy is not related to dog ownership.
As I scroll down the answers start to become unrelated to the question and if the red flags weren't already there they certainly where when as I scrolled down to see the other bullet points:
"Should I watch Fullmetal Alchemist before brother hood?"
"That's a hard maybe because of the Portal of Truth."
I decided to poke around the site and my eyebrows raise when I see this blog post and I see that Hubert has a dog named Bella (See if you can spot the eyebrow raising post).
I'll be honest, this thought has never ever crossed my mind until now. I think it'll stay in the back of my mind and now.. it'll stay in the back of your mind too. However, worry not because once I see the pagination I notice that there's something odd. I see that there are ten posts per page and a total of... 7888 pages. That's right, there's roughly 78,880 blog posts spanning from August 17th to September 6th. **That's right**, our boy Hubert has written roughly 3,750 blog posts PER DAY EVERYDAY for 21 days. An herculean feat for any human--but not for an AI.
It's clear now that this blog's content was generated by an AI. What's surprising is it made it on the frontpage of QWANT's search. It dawned on me that the reason why there's two dates on QWANT's description is because it's an attempt to manipulate the SEO and QWANT doesn't differentiate between the metadata and the blog post's content--at least from what I can tell. Granted it's not the first result, but it's on the front page... and QWANT isn't exactly a tiny website. It's relatively small, but according to Wikipedia it's the 1415th most visited website in the world. You probably have fewer Facebook friends than that but in a world with 7 billion people... that's not small at all. From UberSuggest, there's an organic monthly traffic of 1 million.
If AI content can rank that high that easily then it shows that we're only at the cusp of AI's destabilizing effect on society. Small search engines may be doomed. We aren't even talking about AI generated images or anything. Just text.