An anonymous reader cites a report from 404 Media. Last week, Ernie Smith, the publisher of the website Tedium, received a “Notice of Copyright Infringement” from a law firm called Commonwealth Legal. Image is connected to client.” […] However, in this case, the email did not request that the photo be removed or specifically hint at a lawsuit. Instead, it requires Smith to place a “visible, clickable link” to a website called “tech4gods” below the photo in question, or else the law firm will take “action.” “I will wake you up,” he demanded. Smith began looking into law firms. He then discovered that Commonwealth Legal was not real and that the images of its “lawyers” were generated by AI.
The threat to “activate case number 86342” is clearly nonsense. What's more, while Commonwealth Legal's website is generic and full of stock photos, I've seen plenty of generic template websites for real law firms. All of the firm's lawyers have that blank, thousand-yard stare that often occurs on websites like “This person doesn't exist,” they don't show up in any lawyer searches or LinkedIn searches, and so far. Their only reverse image search results will be displayed. A broken website called Generated.Photos “uses AI to generate people who don't exist online, change their clothing, and change their facial and body features. We provide a download service. “Every face scanned was likely AI-generated using a generative adversarial network (GAN) model,” said Ali Shahryari, co-founder and CTO of AI detection startup Reality Defender. he told 404 Media. The address listed on Commonwealth Legal is his fourth floor in a one-story building, which is completely different from the image on the website, and both phone numbers are unreachable. No one responded to the contact form I filled out. Mr. Smith realized that what was happening here was not at all an attempt at copyright enforcement or copyright trolling. Instead, this is a backlink SEO scam, where a website owner tries to improve their Google rankings by requesting, paying, or blackmailing someone to link to their website.
Tech4Gods.com is a gadget review website run by a guy named Daniel Balzac, whose content is “supplemented by an AI writing assistant.” In this case, the photos Smith “infringed” were downloaded from the royalty-free website Unsplash, which 404 Media also uses from time to time. This image was not taken by Balzac and has nothing to do with him, he told me via email. The original photographer did not respond to requests for comment sent via Unsplash. Barczak said he had previously purchased backlinks to his website for his SEO purposes, but said he didn't know who was doing it or why. “I don't know. It certainly has nothing to do with me,” he said. “But recently someone has been building spam links against my site that I work with.” “I have mastered on-page SEO, but unfortunately I don't have the time to link I’m buying it,” he added. “I used to have a terrible link builder, and I think he's mad at me for letting him go. It's hard to say that the web is huge, and everyone can link whenever they want.” You can.'' Link building is an SEO strategy designed to get external websites to link to your website. He added: “Bad links can be damaging.” [the site’s] However, in this case, the “lawyer” is blackmailing a well-established technology blogger, and links from Tedium are likely to be treated as positive in the eyes of search algorithms.
