The Sports News Story You Click On Could Be AI Slop

NBC Sportz did not respond to a request for comment. Neither NBCSport.co.uk nor BBCSportss.co.uk have email addresses or other contact information associated with the public, so WIRED has no way of making contact. (All three websites are registered by the domain management company Namecheap, as well as a CBS News impersonation site that DoubleVerify suspects is in the Synthetic Echo network.)Bad actors have tried to upstage successful media outlets by publishing their work without permission for many. year. Today, AI tools allow variations in this scheme to develop rapidly. “This low-quality content is nothing new,” Saporta said. “But it’s easier to replicate and scale with today’s tools.” The number of AI slop websites has increased every year since generative AI tools exploded in popularity in 2023. Last February, shortly after WIRED began reporting. up the AI ​​content factory, media watchdog NewsGuard has identified 725 “news and information sites” loaded with AI content. By January 2025, it had identified at least 1,150 such sites. “The volume has increased,” said Shouvik Paul, chief operating officer of AI detection company Copyleaks. “A lot of these are foreign-run operations, and they’re very shady, so how do you keep going?” To make matters even more confusing for readers, some mainstream media sites have attempted to publish AI-generated news articles. (Sports Illustrated itself runs allegedly AI-generated content, which its parent company says is provided by a third party.) In other cases, domain name hustlers have bought media property URLs that have fallen on hard times and revived them as AI content factories, sometimes replacing them. previous voice journalism with robot pablum. Some of these sites have enkindling the confusion of the real world; in October, the SEO content factory posted an AI-generated announcement for the Halloween parade in Dublin, Ireland. Although there are no events planned, many revelers are seen looking forward to the party. Paul Copyleaks describes the way some of these websites show the identity of real store brands to sell junk as “like phishing.” In some cases, these sites appear to be making actual phishing attempts. One of the sites in the DoubleVerify ring was identified as being designed to impersonate a Fox news outlet based in Nigeria. It greets readers with a series of suspicious pop-up ads for software. While the pop-up appears to be fake, websites in this group appear to be doing a brisk business in programmatic advertising, which is large-scale embedded advertising. automated ad buying rather than a direct relationship between a website and a specific advertiser. Many have many 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 the Synthetic Echo operator chose sports as one of its main content categories because it is considered safer for brands than hard news. , e-commerce giant Net-A-Porter, makeup giant Sephora, and resorts. chain Kalahari Resorts, it emerged when WIRED monitored the website. None of the companies responded to requests for comment. At a time when trust in the media has declined and many news outlets have reduced revenue, this type of run of the mill content is a double whammy. It destroys the information ecosystem with junk and stolen content, and siphons off programmatic ad revenue from legitimate content producers.

Source link