Google’s AI models shut down 39 million fraudulent advertisers

Google’s use of AI to combat harmful ads has resulted in the suspension 39.2 million fraudulent accounts.

On Wednesday, the tech giant published its 2024 Ads Safety Report, highlighting its use of advanced LLMs (Large Language Models) to detect and enforce advertiser fraud. Since 2023, Google has added “50 enhancements” to its LLMs that “need only a fraction of the information earlier models needed to quickly recognize emerging threats, identify patterns of abuse, and distinguish legitimate businesses from scams.” Indicators of abuse that can be detected by Google’s AI tool include business impersonation and illegal payment details.

As a result, Google blocked or removed 5.1 billion ads last year. The majority of those ads Google stopped were due to “abusing the ad network,” meaning methods of circumventing Google’s review process by tricking users with bait-and-switch ads or using malware. Other ads caught in the sweep involved trademark violations as well as personalized ads that violate Google’s policies by targeting users or promoting products based on sensitive topics like personal hardships, identify and belief, and sexual interests.

Google is also using AI to fight the increase of bad actors leveraging AI for scams. Deepfakes have become more pervasive and convincing. Last year, actor Tom Hanks’ likeness was used to shill medical hoaxes. Scarlett Johansson took legal action against an app for deepfaking her image and voice to promote it. Google went after “bad actors using AI-generated imagery or audio to imply an affiliation with a celebrity to promote a scam” by suspending over 700,000 advertiser accounts, which led to a 90 percent decrease in reports. Overall, it blocked or removed 415 million scam ads.

Google’s ad safety team said they shut down the majority of scammy accounts before users were ever served an ad. Given the present volume of offensive of harmful stuff on the internet, we shudder to think of the ads that never saw the light of day.