clickbait

Google is taking action against algorithmically-generated spam. The search engine giant just announced upcoming changes, including a revamped spam policy, designed to keep AI clickbait out of its search results.“It sounds like it’s going to be one of the biggest updates in the history of Google,” says Lily Ray, senior director of SEO at the marketing agency Amsive. “It could change everything.”In a blog post, Google claims the change will reduce “low-quality, unoriginal content” in search results by 40 percent. It will…

Pulp Fiction star Bruce Willis’ wife went on Instagram to school the media. Recently, she came out to a clickbait about Bruce Willis which read, “There is no more joy in her husband”. The 68 year-old actor is battling with frontotemporal dementia. Regarding this whole matter, she posted on Instagram yesterday, March 3rd. In that video, Bruce’s wife Emma said, “Now, I can just tell you, that is far from the truth. Stop scaring people to think that once they get a diagnosis of some…

In his spare time, Tony Eastin likes to dabble in the stock market. One day last year, he Googled a pharmaceutical company that seemed like a promising investment. One of the first search results Google served up on its news tab was listed as coming from the Clayton County Register, a newspaper in northeastern Iowa. He clicked, and read. The story was garbled and devoid of useful information—and so were all the other finance-themed posts filling the site, which had absolutely nothing to do with northeastern Iowa. “I knew…

“I’m not a fan of AI,” Nebojša Vujinović Vujo says. The admission surprises me: He has built a bustling business by snapping up abandoned news outlets and other websites and stuffing them full of algorithmically generated articles. Although he accepts that his model rankles writers and readers alike, he says he’s simply embracing an unstoppable new tool—large language models—in the same way people rationally swapped horse-drawn buggies for gas-powered vehicles. “I hate cars. They’re making my planet bad,” he says. “But…

Would you want the pilot flying the plane you’re on to stick a gadget on their head that literally obstructs their field of vision? It sounds like a dumb question, but since the Apple Vision Pro headset came out last week, we’ve learned there is no limit to the things people will do for a couple of clicks.Apple's Vision Pro Seems Powerful, But Who Is It For? | Future TechPilot Chris Clarke took clickbait to new heights on Tuesday when he posted a 21-second video of himself on X, formerly known as Twitter, appearing to fly…

What a heinous month for the media. Almost every day, a publication announces layoffs or shuts down. Sports Illustrated just let go almost all of its staff after weathering an embarrassing scandal about AI-generated articles. It's unclear what the desiccated magazine’s future holds, but the sad fate of another formerly great outlet offers a preview of what may await fallen media properties.In 2018, the indie women’s website The Hairpin stopped publishing, along with its sister site The Awl. This year, The Hairpin has been…

Clickbait in web journalism and blogging is a big problem, and the staff of the Artifact news app thinks it’s found a solution by way of AI. Artifact has introduced the capability for readers to flag clickbait headlines and have artificial intelligence rewrite them to accurately reflect article contents. AI won’t rewrite every news article headline that Artifact circulates. The GPT-4-infused app will only tinker with a header if enough app users flag it as clickbait. Once that happens, Artifact gets to work on…

Tired of search engine optimization run amok? After allowing users to flag some articles as clickbait, the Artifact news app now says it wants users to mark clickbait headlines they come across so it can rewrite the title text using AI. Hell, if enough users also report the same headline, Artifact will then display that AI-generated headline to all users at once.How Conspiracy Theories and Disinformation Spiral Out of Control on the Internet | TechModoOn Friday, the AI-driven article recommendation app said it would let…

Meta lashed out at its home state on Wednesday, threatening to shut off access to news links on Facebook and Instagram in California if the legislature passed a bill forcing it to pay news publishers for their journalism.Meta's Apparent Firing GoofThe proposed bill, dubbed the California Journalism Preservation Act, would force social networks like Facebook and Instagram or search engines like Google to pay news publishers a “journalism usage fee” when users access articles and when they sell advertising against news…

There are lots of ways to write a headline, many of them bad. Take this article, for instance. It might’ve been titled:Why Banning TikTok Won’t Protect Our PrivacyYou’ll Never Believe What This App Lets Users DoorEmerging App Wages War Against Fake Newsor evenThis Trendy News App Empowers Users With One Weird Trick.But if it had been, then you might’ve felt let down by the actual content of the story. Clickbait tends to do that: make big promises, build expectations, and then deliver something much less exciting than…