It brings us no pleasure to report this, but: the unholy union of SEO spam and AI-generated muck is here. And in this new age of mass-produced online garbage, reality seems to be headed right out the door. Earlier this week, we stumbled onto a website called The Enlightened Mindset, which appears to be a dark vision of the AI-generated future of the web. Among other causes for concern, there’s no contact information, and the many thousands of articles in the site’s sizable archive only date back to January 2023. Most importantly, of these thousands of published stories, the vast majority contain telltale signs of AI generation. The text is generic and lacks backlinks for sources, and the included pictures — a garbled, illegible mess of horrifying, hilarious, or otherwise bizarre images — often appear to be AI-generated as well. So, in other words, a lot of red flags. But it actually gets worse. Upon closer inspection, the text of the site’s AI-produced articles is often riddled with misinformation, including AI-fabricated quotes — which, concerningly, are often attributed to entirely real people. Take, for example, a particularly nutty January 2023 blog we stumbled across titled “Is Hagrid Played By a Robot? An Exploration of the Possibility.” We should note that there’s a remote kernel of reality in here. Though the late — and human — Robbie Coltrane played the beloved character, there was an animatronic Hagrid head used sometimes on the “Harry Potter” set. The article seems to do some legwork, including a quote…An AI Is Inventing Fake Quotes by Real People and Publishing Them Online