NBC Sports did not respond to a request for comment. Neither NBCSport.co.uk nor BBCSports.co.uk have email addresses or other contact information publicly available, so WIRED had no way to contact them. (All three websites are registered by domain management company Namecheap, as is the CBS News imitation site that DoubleVerify suspects is within the Synthetic Echo network.)
Bad actors have been trying to capitalize on successful media outlets for years by republishing their work without permission. But now, thanks to AI tools, variations on this scheme are proliferating at a new accelerated pace. “This type of low-quality content is not really new,” Saporta said. “But with these current tools, it’s much easier to replicate and scale.”
Since the popularity of generative AI tools exploded in 2023, the number of AI slop websites has skyrocketed every year. Last February, shortly after WIRED first began reporting on the rise of AI content mills, media monitoring firm NewsGuard identified 725 “news and information” cases. A site full of AI content.” By January 2025, we had identified at least 1,150 of these sites.
“Volume has increased,” said Shouvik Paul, chief operations officer at AI detection company Copyleaks. “Many of these are run by foreign countries and are very shady operations, so how do they keep up?”
To further confuse readers, many mainstream media sites are experimenting with publishing AI-generated news articles. (Sports Illustrated itself allegedly operated AI-generated content, but its parent company says the content was provided by a third party.) Other cases In some cases, domain name hustlers have purchased URLs of distressed media assets and brought them back to life. AI content manufacturers can also replace previously healthy journalism with robotic pabulum.
Some of these sites are already causing real-world disruption. In October, SEO Content Mill posted an AI-generated announcement for a Halloween parade in Dublin, Ireland. Even though no such event was planned, large crowds of people gathered to revel in anticipation of the festivities.
Paul from CopyLeaks called it “similar to phishing” as some of these websites sell junk products while flaunting the brand identity of genuine retailers. In some cases, these sites actually appear to be phishing. One of the sites in the ring that DoubleVerify identified was designed to imitate the Nigeria-based Fox News station. It presents potential readers with a series of suspicious pop-up advertisements about the software.
Although the pop-up looks fake, the group’s websites appear to be doing a brisk business with programmatic advertising. Programmatic advertising is advertising that is served through large-scale automated ad buying, rather than through a direct relationship between a particular website and an advertiser. Many feature rich banners managed by popular programmatic ad servers such as Criteo and Sharethrough. (Neither Criteo nor Sharethrough responded to requests for comment.) DoubleVerify’s report notes that synthetic Echo operators are more likely to sell their products because they are considered more brand safe than particularly hard news. The company chose sports as one of its main content categories.
While WIRED monitored these websites, programmatic ads from a number of well-known companies, including tech giants like Asana and Oracle, e-commerce giant Net-a-Porter, cosmetics giant Sephora, and resort chain Kalahari Resorts, were discovered. Appeared. None of these companies responded to requests for comment.
At a time when trust in the media has plummeted and many news organizations are experiencing a decline in revenue, this kind of shoddy content milling is a double whammy. They pollute the information ecosystem with junk and stolen texts and siphon programmatic advertising revenue from legitimate content creators.
