Advertise here with Carbon Ads

This site is made possible by member support. ๐Ÿ’ž

Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.

When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!

kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.

Beloved by 86.47% of the web.

๐Ÿ”  ๐Ÿ’€  ๐Ÿ“ธ  ๐Ÿ˜ญ  ๐Ÿ•ณ๏ธ  ๐Ÿค   ๐ŸŽฌ  ๐Ÿฅ”

The unsettling scourge of obituary spam. “In the wake of death, AI-generated obituaries litter search results, turning even private individuals into clickbait.” Thanks, Google!

Comments  3

Sort by: thread โ€” thread . latest . faves

A
Andy Baio

I completely agree that the fault for this primarily lies with Google. They created the financial incentives for people to create garbage like this, have completely failed to weed out inauthentic content from search, allowed bad actors to game their search rankings to drive traffic to these garbage sites, and are now instead focused on building free AI tools to let people pollute the web even more.

J
Jason KottkeMOD

Yeah exactly. And their incentives to fix this are all wrong.

C
Caroline G.

The New York Times recently had an article about this also: He Died in a Tragic Accident. Why Did the Internet Say He Was Murdered?

This thread is closed for new comments & replies. Thanks to everyone for participating!