A.I.-generated spider identification web-page

Curators
1

This came up in a web search for some made-up spider names flagged for deletion on iNaturalist. At first glance it looks like a legitimate, useful web-site, but the more you look at it, the more you start to realize it’s all completely made up. Lots of factual errors, lots of misidentified photos. The people on the About Us page don’t exist. The legalese on the Terms and Conditions page has grammatical errors.

But it looks pretty, and looks like it took a lot of work to make, which has already been enough to fool some people.

I in no way endorse anything about this site, quite the opposite really, but it’s a nice example of the kind of fake stuff we’re probably going to see a lot more of in the future:
spideridentifications. com (Warning: lots of ads if you aren’t blocking them. Mod edited to deactivate link)

I bring this up here for two reasons. 1) To let curators know that sites like these exist. Doing a web search for an English name to verify it’s in use isn’t enough now - you have to actually confirm that the search results aren’t automatically generated. 2) To rant: WTF? Why would someone do this?

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2

Thanks for the heads up. It appears they have a LinkedIn page. The page implies they’re approaching this from the pet spider market. The page also indicates they have a contract PhD arachnologist looking over the articles. Maybe that will lead to improved accuracy down the line, though at the moment the site is clearly a mess. https://www.linkedin.com/company/spideridentifications/

3

Just FYI before you click it also has tons of ads. Some of the content is older than widespread AI availability, and I suspect is more very low quality content, or perhaps procedurally generated by something much more rudimentary than current AI models. Its probably honestly created to bait people into linking it to generate traffic for its ads; its been linked in a number of news articles, multiple wikipedia article citations, and maybe even some government sources in the middle east?

But I definitely have also seen obviously fully AI generated pages for some taxa on other sites.

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Increasingly when I search for birds (especially species from exotic places) I get AI-generated images in the image results and spammy low-effort clickbait “informational” websites in the text results. Very frustrating.

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5

Thanks, I’ve added a warning in the original post. I use an ad-blocker, so I didn’t notice.

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It’s a fabrication; I’m now guessing it may have been a ‘real’ project at some point, that then went fully into search engine ads and eventually added AI. Check out these web archive captures of their about us randomly adding and removing team members in each successive capture; looks like AI generated backgrounds:
September 27, 2023 capture
https://web.archive.org/web/20230927022033/https://spideridentifications.com/about-us
October 22, 2023 capture
https://web.archive.org/web/20231022230157/https://spideridentifications.com/about-us
November 3, 2023 capture
https://web.archive.org/web/20231103142229/https://spideridentifications.com/about-us

Also in 2022 their about page had an email address ‘semproz’, which assuming it is meant to be parsed as ‘SEM pro’ probably indicates they want to be known as ‘Search Engine Marketing Professionals’ or similar.

Perhaps if someone is interested it would be good to go remove the links to the site on wikipedia.

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7

I agree that this may have been a legitimate project at some point, though I suspect this was originally intended to drive traffic to a pet retailer.

I do not believe we have enough evidence to say that the About page is fabricated. Richard Pearce, for instance, is a real person with a research gate page (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Richard-Pearce-4) and a LinkedIn profile (I won’t post that link). The LinkedIn profile indicates he began working remotely as a contractor for the website in question in October 2023. To me, the best explanation of the evidence you supplied is that in September-November 2023 there was restructuring of the team.

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Try using a search engine ai blocker extension. I have found ublocker and some ai filters to get rid of the majority of annoying spam out there and I’ve never had it block anything important, but if you suspect it is hiding something theres always a button to click to see the blocked sites.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/?utm_source=addons.mozilla.org&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=search

https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/subscriptions

https://github.com/laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist

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9

LinkedIn lists the site as - Pet Services.
So that is fair warning.
I didn’t go the actual site.

The made up names intended to sell more of the product. The ‘pet’ spiders.

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10

Advertising revenue?

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11

it’s relatively low effort to host a site like this and populate it with content via AI. you can host a ton of ads on the pages though, and that tends to be revenue source #1. then a lot of these sites will also try to drive traffic to a low-effort e-shop, which tends to provide bad goods and worse customer service when customers eventually try to complain, and that’s revenue source #2.

the worst scams are those that take your content and try to pass them off as their own to monetize in any number of ways.

the only real solution to end the proliferation of this sort of thing is for ad and search companies to stop giving these folks ad dollars and views, but i’m not sure there’s enough incentive to do that.

i wouldn’t even link to their site in the forum because that’s just going to drive traffic to their site and encourage them to do more of this sort of thing.

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Yes, I edited the original post and changed the formatting so that the site in question is identified, but the forum no longer contains a link that might drive traffic to the site/increase their SEO.

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copy the link.
Then Google search to see what is said about it.
Rule 1 - don’t click the link.

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Fair; one of the others also has a linkedin, listing 3 simultaneous part-time employments from Sep 2023-Sep 2024 (in addition to full time employment as a Veterinarian):

RESEARCHER / REVIEWER/FACT CHECKER AT SPIDERIDENTIFICATIONS. COM (ISRAEL) PART-TIME& REMOTE
RESEARCHER / REVIEWER/FACT CHECKER AT BUTTERFLY IDENTIFICATION PART-TIME& REMOTE
RESEARCHER / REVIEWER/ FACT CHECKER AT 101 DOG BREEDS (Part-time & Remote )

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15

I use UDM14 to search. It does the trick!

https://udm14.com

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16

thanks for showing that, I wanted something to work with my existing search engine of ecosia so that’s why I went with that solution