Information Cancer:  Watch Out For AI Generated Websites

By Maxwell R. Carter, PE, CFM

November 5, 2026

Today one of my clients questioned my decision to not use dowel bars to connect new 6" concrete pavement to existing 4" thick concrete pavement. I just started my engineering firm this year and I am doing this project probono for a homeowner whose driveway culvert washed out from decades of erosion and poor construction.

I made a concrete pavement technical topic page in early 2025 before I ever heard about artificial intelligence. At that time I was designing a concrete pavement for a municipality that I worked for. During that time I tried to find as many tools for concrete pavement that I could find. That page has not been updated since I designed that project. For that project I paid for premium resources and training from the American Concrete Institute. I also used resources from the American Concrete Pavement Association and the Concrete Pavement Technology Center. While researching for additional resources I found Pave Ahead from the National Ready Mixed Concrete Association. Pave Ahead is a program that offers free technical assistance from a concrete pavement expert on concrete pavement projects. The Pave Ahead engineer was the engineering expert that reviewed my project's construction drawings and specifications before the municipality issued them for bidding. She said that I used the correct design guide for my project and recommended some additional resources. We bid the project and it came in over budget. I had designed that for trailer parking because there were trailers parked on the site already. After it came in over budget the City department heads found a new location to park the trailers so the project scope could be reduced. That project was successfully built. 

At the start of my current project I reached out to Pave Ahead, but I did not hear back from them. I am not sure if Pave Ahead provides assistance on residential pavement projects. Since I am just getting my firm started I offered to do this project for free so I can build my firm's templates. They got an intial quote from a contractor and it was $30,000 more than what my client anticipated.

There is not much budget on this project and I used a free concrete pavement design resource. I don't remember what it was that I looked up, but I think it was from one of the organizations I recognized from my previous concrete pavement design. The free information I found on dowels did not show any information for concrete less than 6" in thickness. My engineering judgement came to the conclusion that 4" thick concrete pavement is not thick enough to accommodate a dowel bar and this may lead to the slab shearing or the joint being damaged. My client had previously requested that the pavement be doweled to the existing pavement. After not seeing the dowel bar size listed on the reference page I told him that I believe the pavement is too thin for a doweled joint.

My client used Google search to research this topic and sent me a link to an AI generated concrete pavement resource that I had never heard of before. The AI generated website said that 4" concrete can use dowel bars. After I told him that the website was AI generated he apologized for getting fooled by AI and accepted my engineering judgement. I sent Pave Ahead another question to get a second opinion about this before I purchase ACI's code requirements for residential concrete (ACI CODE-332-20).

I went into Bing Webmaster and looked at the backlinks the AI generated website has. Bing currently shows The Engineering Resource having backlinks from 10 domains while this AI tool has 62 domains linking to it. I took a screenshot of their list of domains in Bing Webmaster and asked Gemini if these are legitimate websites. Gemini reported that those other websites are also AI generated. This is information cancer. AI is linking to other AI content. I think AI is/will be getting trained on AI slop in the future. It is getting hard to tell what is legitimate information and what is AI slop.

For the record, I took a break from working on this website in February of 2026 when Lent started. Between fall of 2024 and Lent 2026 I worked on this website significantly. I believe that this was before AI generated websites were everywhere, but I could be wrong. The lesson to be learned is to question everything you read online now and see if it is a legitimate source. Really between the start of Lent in 2026 and now I have not added a significant amount of resources. I spent a lot of time filming video in Big Spring Park and it was a nice break.

This past weekend I ordered a special encyclopedia that was published in 2016 to help me find real engineering organizations. The Encyclopedia of Associations contains information about over 24,000 associations. I will be using it going forward to find real engineering organizations that existed in 2016 when Gale Research published about them. Please question every source you find even if I linked to it previously. AI may have tricked me too before I even knew to question it, but I think I have done a great job of finding quality organizations to share with my users.

The AI images on The Engineering Resource make it look like an AI generated website. It is hard to tell what on the internet is real and what is not. I am grateful for all the endorsements that this website has received and will likely keep the IEEE Try Engineering endorsement at the website banner since the homepage looks like an AI generated website. That concrete pavement AI generated website had endorsements from other AI generated websites flowing across the screen on its homepage. Always check if those endorsements are from legitimate institutions. I generated the images and uploaded them to the webbuilder application manually. Everything on this website I built manually.

Someone told me today that physical libraries are dying, but I think that AI is weakening the usefulness of the internet. Real books published without the use of AI are good tools. It is like my family still uses a washing machine from the 1970's and a refridgerator from the 1980's. Stuff was made better the old fashion way than it is today with all the shortcuts.