Several major US alternative weekly newspapers are publishing search engine-optimized lists of porn performers, which appear to be generated by artificial intelligence, alongside their editorial content.
If you open the Village Voice’s homepage on your phone, for example, you’ll see articles from freelancers (veteran columnist Michael Musto still writes occasionally), as well as archival work from older, well-known writers, like Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic Greg Tate. You’ll also see a tab in its drop-down menu labeled “OnlyFans.” Clicking on it opens a catalog of articles categorizing different types of porn performers by demographic, from “Turkish” to “incest” to “granny.” These blog posts link to hundreds of different OnlyFans accounts and are presented as editorial work, with no labels indicating they are ads or sponsored.
Similar content appears on the websites of LA Weekly, owned by Street Media, the same parent company as the Village Voice, as well as the St. Louis-based alternative weekly Riverfront Times. While there is a chance that some of these articles were written by human freelancers, the writing bears signs of being the work of artificial intelligence.
According to AI detection startup Reality Defender, which analyzed a sample of these posts, the content of the articles registers a “high probability” of containing AI-generated text. One analyzed example, a Riverfront Times article titled “The 19 Best Free Asian OnlyFans with Free Asian OnlyFans in 2024,” concludes with the following sentence, exemplary in its generic platitudes: “Explore, savor, and discover your next favorite addiction—and we’ll be back with more crazy talents in the future!”
“We’re seeing an increasing share of traditional media being reborn as new AI-generated media,” says Reality Defender co-founder and CTO Ali Shahriyari. “Unfortunately, this means a lot less informative and newsworthy content and more SEO-focused junk that really just wastes people’s time and attention. Monitoring these types of publications isn’t even part of our daily lives, but we’re seeing more of them popping up.”
Los Angeles Weekly fired or offered severance packages to most of its staff in March 2024, while the Riverfront Times fired all of its staff in May 2024 after parent company Big Lou Media sold it to an unnamed buyer.
The Village Voice’s only remaining editorial staff member, RC Baker, says he’s not involved in the OnlyFans posts, though they appear on the site as editorial content. “I only do news and cultural reporting from New York City. I have nothing to do with OnlyFans. That content is handled by an independent team that’s based, I believe, in Los Angeles,” he told WIRED.
Former LA Weekly editor-in-chief Darrick Rainey also claims that he had nothing to do with the OnlyFans lists when he worked there, nor did his colleagues in the editorial department. “We were not at all happy about it and had no involvement in publishing it at all,” he says.
Former employees are concerned about seeing their archival work mixed with SEO porn. “It’s heartbreaking in many ways,” says former Riverfront Times writer Danny Wicentowski. “It’s like watching a beloved home being devoured by vines or abandoned to its fate.”