Fake AI law firms are sending fake DMCA threats to generate fake SEO gains

3 years ago by David Gerard to c/techtakes

How one journalist found himself targeted by generative AI over a keyfob photo.

mii 49 points 3 years ago

I stand by my opinion that SEO basically ruined the internet. First keyword optimization made me scroll through seventeen paragraphs of someone's life story before getting to a recipe for boiled eggs, and now this.

Why would someone go to the trouble of making a law firm out of NameCheap, stock art, and AI images (and seemingly copy) to send quasi-legal demands to site owners? Backlinks, that's why.

Oof, back in the day all we had to do was write a nice email to get someone to put a backlink to our page into the sidebar of their Geocities page.

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lurch 19 points 3 years ago

i remember back in the day they had white on white tiny keywords on the bottom of pages. it was ridiculous. then google started to check if the text was visible 🤣

the shenanigans will never end unless you have actual faithful people curating it and google absolutely won't have it.

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BlueMonday1984 10 points 3 years ago

Reject search engines, return to webrings/directories

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AcausalRobotGod 10 points 3 years ago

I think you mean it made the Internet MORE AWESOME and ACCELERATING THE CAPITALISM ACAUSAL ROBOT GOD. How else can we get the singularity if we don't have devs getting at least 300K compensation packages?

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V0ldek 9 points 3 years ago

I remember being like 14yo and learning that "SEO specialist" is a fucking job title. Even then I was like, that sounds like a fake job, what's the fucking value of that?

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gerikson 5 points 3 years ago

Yeah I remember being struck by that too, but then I worked in "business" and there's a ton of weird stuff people do for a living (productively, for some late-stage capitalism value of productive). It just happened to intrude into the there-to cozy world of the web.

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