GenAI-powered MFAs are exploding as quality becomes infinite
On AdExchanger, Anthony Vargas has thoroughly lifted the lid on the practical implications of generative AI for digital advertising, starting from a study by DecryptAds.
In January, I asked what you do when quality becomes infinite. Generative AI makes good-enough content cheap and abundant, and quality stops being what separates premium media owners from everyone else. Vargas’s article describes 2,116 cooking sites built on that kind of content, carrying, according to DecryptAds, ads from major blue chip and Fortune 500 brands, and the checks that the industry relies on to stop advertising budgets from reaching them.
The recipes on these sites are, in Vargas’s words, “close-enough versions” of viral trends and popular pages from other cooking sites. What gives the sites away is not the recipes but what surrounds them: pages packed with ads, and author pages with AI-generated faces. Zach Edwards of DecryptAds is right to raise the alarm, because more of this inventory goes live every day. In May I wrote that the MFA tail is not being cleaned up but replaced by a respectable-looking middle: accurate content, plausible authors, visitors who get what they came for.
Nowhere is safe
DecryptAds found the sites by monitoring ad tech companies registered in “risky geos”: Russia, China, Cyprus, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates. Cyprus is in the European Union and Turkey in NATO. The concept of risk is subjective. In mid-October the Citizen Lab reported that ads bought by Discover-Tech, an Israeli ad tech company, were used to target the devices of Al Jazeera staff with spyware. Discover-Tech bought through Google’s exchanges and sat on Google’s and IAB Europe’s vendor lists from 2020 until October. Neither Israel nor the US is among what mainstream public opinion considers “risky geos”. The world has changed and nowhere is safe. Geography tells you where a company is registered, not who it is.
