Wannabe supervillain pulls AI 'heist' to steal competitor traffic, but really just shows how unchecked AI is going to ruin the internet

A photograph of a burning dumpster. — (Image credit: David Buzzard via Getty Images)

There's a certain kind of scam, old as time, that revolves around selling people something that tells them to sell the same thing. That's not how it's presented, of course. The pitch is that if only you knew X (my secret knowledge) you would easily have Y (money, young lovers, cars). Perhaps the most egregious contemporary example of this kind of grift is Andrew Tate and his "Hustlers University", but there are a million of them out there, and the internet has just turned up an example of what the future for this particular hustle looks like.

Take a bow Jake Ward, not only the latest guy who wants to make money by selling you a pipe dream but a pioneering example of an AI scammer. Mr. Ward's modus operandi is simple. Creating content is hard. So why not just use AI to steal it?

This isn't even me putting words in his mouth: Ward is flagrantly open about what he's proposing, calling it a "heist" in some vain effort to make it seem daring and sexy rather than theft.

"We pulled off an SEO heist that stole 3.6M total traffic from a competitor," said Ward on X. "We got 489,509 traffic in October alone."

Half a million clicks isn't anywhere near what a major site would pull in a month, but it is a considerable amount of traffic nevertheless: and certainly of a scale where you could be selling a lot of ads. And Ward did it by using AI to rip-off an unnamed competitor's content.

Ward's company is registered in the UK as Content Growth, which is certainly a nice euphemism, and the methodology is as brazenly unapologetic as you get. Ward says that he:

"1. Exported a competitor’s sitemap

2. Turned their list of URLs into article titles

3. Created 1,800 articles from those titles at scale using AI

18 months later, we have stolen:

- 3.6M total traffic

- 490K monthly traffic"

So: nicking headlines, feeding those into an AI automated system that writes articles based on those headlines, then publishing them and taking traffic that should have gone to the original site. Ward just outright calls it stealing, so I guess at least he's open about that, and goes on to outline how to do this (and naturally plugs his own company while doing so). He says the initial process produced "1,800 articles in a few hours."

YOU ARE SHITTING IN THE WATER SUPPLYNovember 27, 2023

and you're proud of this? pumping garbage to get to the top of the trash heap? what about trying to make actually good and useful content... oh that's right, it's hard 🤔November 24, 2023

Now I'm sure there will be those among you cheering this on, and of course I'm in the position of being a flesh-and-blood human being who makes a living from writing—so I was never gonna like this in the first place. But when even Ward himself is characterising this as theft, surely we need to wonder about where the internet is going.

Do you want to read PC Gamer? Or do you want to read one of several thousand websites with a similar-sounding name that re-publish PCG headlines with a bunch of AI-generated paragraphs underneath? PCG isn't even close to the worst case scenario: imagine when this kind of model is being applied to the New York Times, Bloomberg, or the BBC. Look at the amount of unverified misinformation we already deal with on a daily basis, then multiply it by a million.

There are of course wider issues here, most prominently how Google and SEO techniques have shaped the contemporary internet, and there are an army of actual human beings out there who already work in SEO optimisation. A recent Verge article caused some drama in SEO-land by suggesting that, perhaps, this was not an ideal situation.

But humans gaming systems has been a fact of life since year dot. AIs that have been trained on copyrighted data set loose on those same systems is going to make Napster look like a picnic, and the big web gatekeepers don't have a clue what to do about it: Meta, for example, is in the incredible position of both having its own AI tool for advertisers and banning AI-generated political ads from Facebook.

This example is just another of AI being used in a bad way, and most people will look at it, tut, and move on. I'll finish this article then move on to writing about another topic. The bigger issue it raises, which is what copyright and human ownership even means in an age of industrial-scale automated thievery, is something we seem unable to confront, restrain, or regulate against. Look at President Biden's legislation "to protect Americans from the potential risks of AI systems" and what's come from it so far: sweet f-all.

Oh well. It's hard to see any winner here other than those like Ward who want to make a fast buck off the work of others, while the losers are… well, pretty much everyone who wants the internet to remain usable as a conduit for human-to-human communication. As one reply to his thread puts it, "This is the equivalent of selling a 'get rich quick' book about how to write a get rich quick book."

Rich is a games journalist with 15 years' experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as "[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike."