I'm gonna guess that it's just popular enough that being in the top 5 results on search engines yields a small net gain in ad revenue. It's possible the decision to generate the fake article was itself made by a machine.

Great piece btw

There was no reason to lie about knowing the Scots language well enough to be the primary contributor by volume to Scots Wikipedia, and yet that's something that happened.

Lies are intentional. A liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it.

What we have here is worse; LLMs give you bullshit. A bullshitter does not care if something is true or false, it just uses rhetoric to convince you of something.

I am far from being someone nostalgic about the old internet, or the world in general back then. Things in many ways sucked back then, we just tend to forget how exactly they sucked. But honestly, a LLM-driven internet is mostly pointless. If what I am to read online is AI generated crap, why bother reading it on websites and not just reading it straight from a chatbot already?