NBC Sportz did not respond to requests for comment. Neither NBCSport.co.uk nor BBCSportss.co.uk has an email address or other contact information publicly associated with them, so WIRED had no way to contact them. (All three websites are registered by the domain management company Namecheap, as is a site that imitates CBS News and that DoubleVerify suspects is within the Synthetic Echo network.)
Bad actors have been trying to trick successful media outlets for years by republishing their work without permission. But now AI tools are allowing variations on this plan to spread at a new accelerated pace. “This kind of low-quality content is not really new,” says Saporta. “But it's so much easier to replicate and scale with these current tools.”
The number of AI slop websites has increased sharply year over year since generative AI tools exploded in popularity in 2023. Last February, shortly after WIRED first started reporting on the rise of AI content factories, media watchdog company NewsGuard had identified 725 “news.” and information sites” filled with AI content. By January 2025, it had identified at least 1,150 of these locations.
“The volume is up,” said Shouvik Paul, chief operations officer of AI detection company Copyleaks. “A lot of these are foreign-run and very shady operations, so how do you keep track?”
To make matters even more confusing for readers, a number of mainstream media sites have experimented with publishing AI-generated news articles. (Sports Illustrated itself reportedly ran AI-generated content, which its parent company said was provided by a third party.) In other cases, domain name scammers have bought the URLs of media properties that had fallen on hard times and rebranded them brought to life. as AI content mills, sometimes replacing their previously wholesome journalism with robotic pablum.
Some of these sites are already causing confusion in the real world; in October, an SEO content factory posted an AI-generated announcement for a Halloween parade in Dublin, Ireland. Although no such event was planned, crowds of revelers showed up expecting festivities.
Paul from Copyleaks described the way some of these websites latched onto the brand identity of genuine outlets to sell junk as 'a kind of 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 Fox news channel in Nigeria. It greets potential readers with a series of suspicious pop-up advertisements for software.
Although the pop-ups appear fake, the websites in this group appear to be doing a good business with programmatic ads, which are ads placed through large-scale automated ad buying rather than a direct relationship between certain websites and advertisers. Many contain a plethora of banners managed by popular programmatic ad servers such as Criteo and Sharethrough. (Neither Criteo nor Sharethrough responded to requests for comment.) DoubleVerify's report suggests that Synthetic Echo operators have chosen sports as one of their top content categories, largely because it is considered more brand safe than hard news.
Programmatic ads from a number of leading companies, including tech companies like Asana and Oracle, e-commerce giant Net-A-Porter, makeup giant Sephora and resort chain Kalahari Resorts, appeared as WIRED monitored these websites. 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 revenues fall, this kind of slop-content-mill ring is a double whammy. It pollutes the information ecosystem with junk and stolen writing, and it siphons off programmatic advertising revenue from legitimate content producers.
