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That sports news story you clicked on could be an AI bug

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That sports news story you clicked on could be an AI bug

NBC Sportz did not respond to requests for comment. Neither NBCSport.co.uk nor BBCSportss.co.uk have an email address or other publicly associated contact information, so WIRED had no way of making contact. (All three websites were registered by domain management company Namecheap, as was a site imitating CBS News that DoubleVerify suspects is within the Synthetic Echo network.)

Bad actors have attempted to take advantage of successful media outlets by republishing their work without permission to many years. Now, however, artificial intelligence tools allow variations of this scheme to proliferate at a newly accelerated pace. “This type of low-quality content is not really new,” says Saporta. “But it’s much easier to replicate and scale with these current tools.”

The number of AI websites has increased sharply year over year since generative AI tools gained popularity in 2023. Last February, shortly after WIRED began reporting on the rise of AI content mills, the company Media surveillance NewsGuard had identified 725 “news stories.” and information sites” filled with AI content. In January 2025, there were identified at least 1,150 of these sites.

“The volume has increased,” says Shouvik Paul, COO of AI detection company Copyleaks. “Many of these are foreign operations and very shady, so how do you keep up?”

To make things more confusing for readers, several traditional media sites have experienced with the publication of AI-generated news articles. (Sports Illustrated itself published supposedly AI-generated content, which its parent company said was provided by a third party.) In other cases, domain name scammers have purchased the URLs of media properties that have fallen on hard times and resurrected them. as AI content factories, sometimes replacing their previously robust journalism with robotic pablum.

Some of these sites are already causing confusion in the real world; In October, an SEO content mill published an AI-generated ad for a Halloween parade in Dublin, Ireland. Although there was no event planned, a crowd of revelers showed up expecting festivities.

Paul from Copyleaks described the way some of these websites were latching onto the brand identity of real media to sell garbage as “kind of like phishing.” In some cases, these sites appear to be conducting actual phishing efforts. One of the sites within the ring that DoubleVerify identified was designed to imitate a Nigeria-based Fox news outlet. It greets potential readers with a series of suspicious software pop-up ads.

While the pop-ups appear fake, the websites in this group appear to do a good business with programmatic ads, which are ads placed through large-scale automated ad purchases rather than a direct relationship between particular websites and advertisers. Many feature a large number of banners managed by popular programmatic ad servers like Criteo and Sharethrough. (Neither Criteo nor Sharethrough responded to requests for comment.) The DoubleVerify report suggests that Synthetic Echo operators chose sports as one of the top content categories specifically because it is considered more brand-safe than hard news.

While WIRED monitored these websites, programmatic ads appeared from several prominent companies, including tech stalwarts like Asana and Oracle, e-commerce bigwig Net-A-Porter, makeup giant Sephora, and resort chain Kalahari Resorts. . None of these companies responded to requests for comment.

At a time when trust in the media has plummeted and many news outlets have seen their revenue decline, this type of trash content network is a double whammy. It pollutes the information ecosystem with junk and stolen writing, and diverts programmatic advertising revenue from legitimate content producers.

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