OpenAI Is Taking Spammers' Money to Pollute the Internet at Unprecedented Scale

Sam Altman's grand vision of democratizing artificial intelligence seems, per a new study, to include an ugly asterisk: it's monetized, at least in part, by spambots filling the web with AI-generated garbage. According to the cybersecurity firm SentinelOne, search engine optimization (SEO) scammers operated undetected for months using what company's experts are calling "AkiraBot," a "modular and sophisticated" tool that was able to bypass CAPTCHAs and other spam detection filters with ease. As SentinelOne explained, the bot was named not for any affiliation with the ransomware group Akira, but because that name, which means "bright" in Japanese, is used in a lot of the creators' affiliated domains. AkiraBot's bottom line seems to be directing traffic to its dubious SEO scheme — and with GPT-4o-mini, that process seems to have been automated at scale. Having attempted to spam roughly 420,000 sites and successfully getting its trash through to some 80,000, the humans behind AkiraBot we ... Read full article.