As I was looking for whole grain ramen options, I kept running across these comparison pages that looked suspiciously similar. Are any of these folks real? How would I tell? Not sure what to make of the sorority one.
I hate that, in addition to endless Amazon results, we have to deal with these (AI?) results, too.
ilinamorato@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Definitely fake, imo. They don’t pass the sniff test for me.
The design is identical on all four sites, with the exception of the logo. Now, this in and of itself isn’t a smoking gun: the design appears to be the WordPress default design from 2024. But it was the first thing I noticed, and with everything else…
The subjects are all the same but the copy is conspicuously different–if you and I were to each write an article about the same ramen, we wouldn’t write the same article, but we would probably come up with a couple of similar sentences or sentence fragments. These are intentionally making an effort to be as different as possible, but with the same title and topic.
I checked the Whois of each site you linked, and they’re all registered through Reykjavik despite having nothing to do with Iceland. Three of them are even pointing to the same Cloudflare servers.
The relationship between the “writers” and the content here make no sense. I could potentially see the Alabama Delta Gamma chapter posting some of these reviews, but Ninjago? Men’s shirts? Shadow the Hedgehog soft toy? “Evan Feinberg” says that he’s an advocate for “limited government,” and “his” photo is of a white dude, so why is “he” “reviewing” women’s fashion and Korean music? What does Cap City Energy have to do with any of this stuff?
By looking into the RSS feed, you can see that most of the articles on a given site were published within the same hour: Evan Feinberg’s articles were all posted between 0800-0900 UTC on June 13, 2024. There are only seconds in between them.
Subjective: The content feels very much like slop. Not even current slop, either, but year-ago slop.
Also subjective: The Cap City Energy site doesn’t seem to know that “Cap” is probably supposed to be short for “Capital.”
If you look in the Internet Archive, you can see that a few (maybe all?) of them used to be real, legitimate sites. Bama Delta Gamma has an archived version that even links to an Instagram that certainly seems to actually be for a sorority. I think that whoever is behind these waited for a URL to become available, snagged it when it expired, copied some of the details (maybe the logo and some images), then fed it along with a list of topics to an AI, and plugged the output into a WordPress site.