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<aside> <img src="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/3e6a3855-8518-4bbb-86d1-16cfb8543786/artificial-intelligence-5.png" alt="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/3e6a3855-8518-4bbb-86d1-16cfb8543786/artificial-intelligence-5.png" width="40px" /> Internal messages from Red Ventures, the parent company of CNET, have been leaked, and they reveal that the company has some serious concerns when it comes to the use of AI to generate articles. It is not the ethical implications of providing readers with misinformation that worries them, but rather the fear of Google noticing the poor quality of the AI's work and subsequently cutting off the supply of search results that Red Ventures depends on for revenue. The company has been utilizing CNET to become an AI-powered SEO money machine, pushing readers to click on affiliate links for credit cards and loans, as well as EDU sites that encourage prospective students to enroll in costly colleges. The head of AI content for the EDU division has even gone so far as to publicly boast about the company's "dirt cheap" AI, which can produce articles for less than a penny per word, ultimately generating millions of dollars in revenue.
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When prominent tech news site CNET was caught last month using AI to quietly publish dozens of articles, it produced widespread alarm. News readers learned in real time that the explosive new capabilities of software like OpenAI's GPT-3 meant they could no longer trust CNET’s journalism to be produced by a human. It didn't help when we discovered that the AI-generated articles were riddled with errors and substantially plagiarized, with CNET eventually issuing corrections on more than half the bot’s published pieces.
Now, leaked internal messages reveal that the negative headlines also kicked off deep concern inside CNET's parent company, Red Ventures.
But the consternation wasn’t about the ethics of providing readers with shoddy AI-generated misinformation. Instead, directors at the company expressed a profoundly cynical anxiety: that Google would notice the dismal quality of the AI’s work — and cut off the precious supply of search results that Red Ventures depends on for revenue.
The company's director of search engine optimization, Jake Gronsky, became particularly unnerved when Google acknowledged the story and issued an official response to it.
"CNET and Bankrate gained a ton of unnecessary attention for their AI Content disclosure to the point that Google issued a statement," he fretted in Slack messages reviewed by Futurism, adding ominously that Google "never does that."
"Residual impact could be on more harsh Google Systems updates," he wrote. "I wouldn't be surprised if G [Google] comes down hard on any sense of irregular content."
He was right to be concerned. As The Verge reported in the wake of the AI revelations, Red Ventures has transformed the once-venerable CNET into an "AI-powered SEO money machine" that depends largely on a constant supply of clicks, supplied by Google searches.
Basically, the company identifies questions about personal finance that people with low financial literacy are likely to search the web for — one recent headline by the CNET AI: "What Is a Credit Card?" — and then churns out articles on those topics designed to capture "high intent" potential customers, who they push toward affiliate links for new credit cards and loans. If a reader signs up for one of these cards or loans, Red Ventures gets a sizable kickback, often pocketing hundreds of dollars for a single customer referral.
"From what I can see, they're not particularly concerned about quality, as you can see from CNET," a former Red Ventures employee told Futurism of the AI. "That's not something the old CNET would have done. This is a post-acquisition situation, with fewer employees expected to produce more content and make the company more money."
The scheme is lucrative at scale, with the company's CEO Ric Elias having already become a billionaire by 2021. The operation has a major weak point, though: Google could knock down the entire house of cards at any moment by deciding to drive the people searching those queries toward better-produced, more helpful content.
Looking at the outraged public reaction to the news about CNET's AI articles, Gronsky realized that the company might have gone too far. In fact, he explained, he saw the whole scandal as a cautionary tale illustrating that Red Ventures shouldn't mark its AI-generated content for readers at all.
"Disclosing AI content is like telling the IRS you have a cash-only business," he warned.
Gronsky wasn't just concerned about CNET and Bankrate, though. He was also worried that a Google crackdown could impact Red Ventures' formidable portfolio of sites that target prospective college students, known internally as Red Ventures EDU.
The EDU division includes BestColleges.com, OnlineMBA.com, and Accounting.com, as well as numerous sites with domain names that imply they're nonprofits, including TheBestSchools.org, the nursing school-focused NurseJournal.org, the cybersecurity-focused CyberDegrees.org, the coding-focused ComputerScience.org, and the psych-focused Psychology.org. They all employ a similar model to CNET and Bankrate — except instead of funneling people with low financial literacy toward credit cards, they push would-be students toward costly college enrollments.
That business model can lead to some dark places. One client the EDU sites plow prospective students toward is Liberty University, a right-wing Christian institution that teaches creationism in science class, has been credibly accused of systematically burying sexual assault reports, and where a diversity supervisor allegedly referred to queer people as “abominations.” Another is the University of Phoenix, a for-profit online school that reached a $191 million settlement with the FTC over allegations that it had enticed students to take on staggering amounts of debt using fraudulent claims about employment opportunities for graduates.
According to the same former employee, the company's EDU portfolio appears to now be publishing immense volumes of AI-generated content — except, unlike with CNET or Bankrate, there's no disclosure at all.
Much of the AI's work, the source suspects, is being used to grind out the sites' avalanche of list-based articles, which carry titles engineered to scoop up Google traffic like "Best HBCUs for LGBTQ+ Students" and "Best Online Master's in Elementary Education Programs."
