A picture from one of the sites that Vujo purchased
Overtone’s Chief Product Officer Christopher Brennan sat down with WIRED reporter Kate Knibbs to discuss her story “Confessions of an AI Clickbait Kingpin.” The piece tells the story of formerly reputable websites such as The Hairpin and The Frisky that have been bought by a Serbian entrepreneur/DJ named Nebojša Vujinović Vujo who fills them with clickbait articles designed to game search engines who rated the previous sites highly, and then profit off of the ad revenue. Targets have included a former Vatican website and a domain from the famed Hong Kong tabloid Apple Daily. “Vujo” says sites can generate him hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue.
Please find the original piece here. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I encourage all of the readers to go and read your piece, though in terms of what you found out, what was the most striking to you about Vujo and how he operates? Was it that he was a DJ? Was it sort of the way that the website sort of structures itself, or his numbers? What struck you most about it?
I mean, the thing that I can’t stop thinking about is what he’s done to Apple Daily … But basically, in addition to Apple Daily, he also definitely owns some other news outlets and what is striking to me is what he has filled them with. I guess I would have been less surprised if he had filled it with like obvious fake news that was inflammatory, that was designed to generate outrage, clicks … I feel like from 2016 to 2020, there was a lot of hand wringing, and some of it was definitely justified, there was this narrative that there was an unstoppable tide of malevolent disinformation, fake news. And what was striking to me was that he he was taking this opposite approach, almost where he was trying to make his clickbait as banal and insipid and non-offensive as possible
WIRED reporter Kate Knibbs
It was striking that it seems like this new tide of AI generated clickbait is defined by its vacuity or vacuousness more than anything else. It’s not intended to generate outrageous it’s not really intended to be read at all. Like he doesn’t give a shit if anyone reads it. He just wants it to appear in searches and get clicked. And I think he would prefer if no one reads it.
And that was the other striking thing. He wasn’t laboring under a delusion that what he was doing was good. He was very upfront about the fact that he wasn’t proud of what he was doing. He knew it was making the internet worse. And I appreciated the frankness.
I think it’s a good point on the misinformation versus sort of what comes after. But I think it’s it’s interesting sort of pinpoint what is this sort of what is, I mean, what’s the problem? I think most people sort of feel it intuitively. But what’s the problem? And if we can extrapolate from that is it going to be worse? What happens if this really happens at scale?
The problem with the content that he’s putting out isn’t really that it’s AI-generated. It’s that it’s AI-generated sludge. It doesn’t have any substance to it. There’s no perspective. There’s no factual information in most cases. I will say there was one article he put on his pope website that was about how the Pope wears red shoes that I was like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know that.’ And then I checked and it was true. The AI is just a tool that’s scaling something that he was already doing before the generative AI boom, and that lots of people are already doing which was just flooding the internet with content that was designed to game Search Engine Optimization versus educate, entertain or otherwise enrich people’s lives in any way. And the alarming thing about what he’s doing is that he’s figured out a way to scale it. And it’s making it very clear that if he’s doing it, other people can do it. It’s really gonna corrode the functionality and fun of the internet to have it flooded with this sort of content.
So what does it mean that there’s this new subcategory of “sludge” stories. (Obits, 404Media, SEO Heist Guy, etc). Is it just reporters picking it up because we’re all sort of depressed? It’s sort of this new trend piece coming out, finding ways to talk about AI sludge and other internet sledge, but what does that genre mean?
It’s capturing a real trend in work that’s happening right now. Like I don’t I don’t think that this is one of those cases where reporters are like paying too much attention like it’s not I think the attention is deserved, if anything, I think there should be more people on this beat because it speaks to, a larger story about what’s happening to work in the U.S. I think that this is sort of a canary in the coal mine for how AI is actually going to impact work.
So I’ve asked you what this means for people, but what does it mean for businesses? If we’re all in the town square, what does it mean to these people who have shops on the side of it when that square is transforming a little bit?
I don’t think it’s good! I am sure there are some who will hire some grey hat SEO workers who might figure out a way to game the system or you know. Vujo’s whole attitude was ‘If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” I’m sure there’s some businesses that will end up taking that approach because what else are you going to do? I think it’s going to make it that much harder for people who are just trying to good products to other humans to get noticed. I’m sure this is going to have weird ramifications for like drop-shipping businesses. I would say, unless you are in the business of proliferating or profiting from Ai sledge this is not going to be a good thing for you.
You’ve mentioned people and robots, you’ve mentioned cynicism and the messed up public square. He’s obviously an example. I mean, Vujo is not running the internet. But what does it mean for what we should care about? If the editor asked, “Why do I care?”, then why do I care?
I think you should care because technology should make life better, not worse. And this is an example of how new technologies can corrode life for regular people. If we don’t pay attention and push for changes, this decay will only accelerate, and we’ll be stuck in a world where a few cynical grifters profit off of making reliable information harder to find
