It's wild how many of the links are hallucinations.

Maybe the error rate is consistent with everything else, we just eisegesis our way into thinking it's not

This is, in turn, making the world of comment and forum spam much worse. Site operators could tag all user-submitted links as "nofollow," making their sites useless for SEO spammers. But spammers have learned that most LLM content scraper bots don't care about "nofollow," so they're back to spamming everywhere.

I've been using Phind lately and I think they do a really good job avoiding this problem. I don't think I've ever run into a fake URL using it. As a search engine, I think I still prefer Kagi but Phind is a great if you want a free option.

The study they link to: https://www.netcraft.com/blog/large-language-models-are-fall...

It seems they are selling some product to protect against this. So, I could believe the headline here, but less confident that this is an unbiased look at the problem.

> "It's actually quite similar to some of the supply chain attacks we've seen before [...] you're trying to trick somebody who's doing some vibe coding into using the wrong API."

I have renewed faith in the universe. It totally makes sense that vibe coding would be poisoned into useless oblivion so early in this game.

I wonder if Cloudflare's new plan for blocking AI from scraping the "real" sites...

LLMs dont seem to hallucinate my niche products and company (sometimes the name of the company doing the product yes, but not the product name, not the url of the company), and according to CloudFlare Radar I'm only between 200000 and 500000 top domains https://radar.cloudflare.com/scan

> “Crims have cottoned on to a new way to lead you astray”

Was - was the article written by AI?

Not just URL's. Google's AI snippet at the top of a search result page recently fed me the wrong phone number for Starlink support. It connected me to a scam being run at scale out of an overseas call center.

After questions like "Is your router plugged in", "What lights are on", etc., they eventually asked for my account email address and password (I was already getting suspicious by that point and of course did not provide). I could hear other agents in the background having similar conversations with other callers.

Based on some probing questions I asked, I think the agents themselves didn't even realize they weren't really working for Starlink.

I was in a hurry and should have double checked the number before calling, rather than blindly trusting the AI shoveled slop.

I tried but wasn't able to recreate the search query that produced the result, and a Google search for the number itself came up blank. A few weeks later, the number just rings with no answer.

I see a few visits from ChatGPT to pages that don't exist on my website. Not only wrong URLs, but topics I don't cover. ChatGPT is not merely stealing my work and audience; it's also adding my name to made-up information.