Low-quality, AI-generated content farms designed to rake in cash via programmatic advertising revenue are cropping up at an alarming rate. And unfortunately, according to a new report by misinformation tracking company NewsGuard, their business model is working. Per the report, over 141 “blue chip” — or internationally recognized — brands are unknowingly supporting hundreds of low-effort AI content farms. Though NewsGuard didn’t call out these blue chip ventures by name, it did note that the list includes “a half-dozen major banks and financial services firms,” “two of the world’s biggest consumer technology companies,” and a “Silicon Valley digital platform,” among others. “It appears that programmatic advertising is the main revenue source for these AI-generated websites,” NewsGuard analyst Lorenzo Arvanitis told MIT Technology Review. “We have identified hundreds of Fortune 500 companies and well-known, prominent brands that are advertising on these sites and that are unwittingly supporting it.” In other words: the destruction of the internet’s usability rages on — and those behind this destruction have a growing financial incentive to keep going. There are a few factors at play that make these findings so concerning, the first being that the proliferation of consumer-facing AI tools makes it incredibly easy to launch a site like this and fill it with boatloads of content. AI programs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT make it easy to generate text at an incredible scale, especially for folks who don’t actually care about the quality. And the scale of these operations is staggering. In the report, NewsGuard notes…People Are Spinning Up Low-Effort Content Farms Using AI