Next time you’re checking sports news online, double-check the URL.
For instance, though a headline like “Red Sox Urged to Risk Passing on Alex Bregman in Favor of $427 Million Superstar” looks ordinary enough—and it seems, at first glance, to come from BBC Sports. But on closer inspection you may be on a knock-off called “BBCSportss,” and the copy is lifted from Sports Illustrated. Elsewhere on that site you’ll also find stories that aren’t stolen directly from another writer, but instead read like a garbled remix of what other sports bloggers have written, and appear to be AI-generated.
DoubleVerify, a software platform tracking online ads and media analytics, recently conducted an analysis of a collection of over 200 websites filled with a mixture of seemingly AI-generated content and snippets of news articles cribbed from actual media outlets. According to the analysis, these sites often chose their domain names and designed their websites to mimic those operated by established media brands, including ESPN, NBC, Fox, CBS, and the BBC. Many of these ersatz sites look like legitimate sports news offerings.
“We did not approve the ‘BBC Sportss’ content, and it is in fact plagiarized,” says Sports Illustrated spokesperson Paige Graham.
“We’re seeing the velocity of fraud schemes double or triple year-on-year,” says DoubleVerify’s chief marketing officer, Dan Slivjanovski. Much of that fraud focuses on bots consuming content rather than creating it, driving up pageviews on websites to rack up unearned ad revenue by making it look like an uptick in human readers. But DoubleVerify has also observed a jump in schemes involving AI click farms, in which networks of websites are stuffed with AI-generated content designed to siphon both real readers and ad revenue away from real outlets.
DoubleVerify observed that this ring, which it calls “Synthetic Echo,” appeared to either copy content from other websites, use AI-generated stories, or a mixture of both. “It’s not even fake news. It’s just random slop,” says Gilit Saporta, who runs the company’s fraud lab. While this isn’t the only slop scheme Saporta has observed, she sees this one as especially notable for how obviously interconnected many of its offerings appeared, often carrying the same web design choices from one site to the next.
WIRED asked deepfake detection startup Reality Defender to analyze a sampling of websites from three of the Synthetic Echo domains. Looking at recent articles from “NBC Sportz,” it determined that the content was written by humans, but stolen from legitimate media sites, with bylines stripped and attributed instead to “nbcsportz.”
One such website ripped off in this way was the Detroit Free Press, which confirmed that it had not authorized republishing its writers’ work. “This content was not licensed by the Detroit Free Press and does not represent our brand or journalism,” says Detroit Free Press spokesperson Lark-Marie Antón. The company plans to take legal action.
For the two other domains Reality Defender tested, NBCSport.co.uk and BBCSportss.co.uk, all of the sample stories came back as likely AI-generated, corroborating DoubleVerify’s findings.
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 it, so WIRED had no way of making contact. (All three websites were registered by the domain management company Namecheap, as was a site imitating CBS News that DoubleVerify suspects of being within the Synthetic Echo network.)
Bad actors have attempted to piggyback off successful media outlets by republishing their work without permission for many years. Now, though, AI tools allow for variations on this scheme to proliferate at a newly accelerated pace. “This kind of low-quality content isn’t 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 sharply increased year-over-year since generative AI tools exploded in popularity in 2023. Last February, shortly after WIRED first began reporting on the rise of AI content mills, 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 sites.
“The volume has gone up,” says Shouvik Paul, chief operations officer of the AI detection company Copyleaks. “A lot of these are foreign-operated, and very shady operations, so how do you even keep up?”
To make matters more confusing for readers, a number of mainstream media sites have experimented with publishing AI-generated news articles. (Sports Illustrated itself ran allegedly AI-generated content, which its parent company has said was provided by a third-party.) In other cases, domain-name hustlers have purchased the URLs of media properties that have fallen on hard times and resurrected them as AI content mills, sometimes replacing their previously sound journalism with robotic pablum.
Some of these sites are already enkindling real-world confusion; in October, an SEO content mill posted an AI-generated announcement for a Halloween parade in Dublin, Ireland. Even though there was no such event planned, throngs of revelers showed up expecting festivities.
Copyleaks’ Paul described the way that some of these websites glommed onto the brand identity of real outlets to peddle junk as “sort of like phishing.” In some cases, these sites appear to be making actual phishing efforts. One of the sites within the ring DoubleVerify identified was designed to imitate a Fox news outlet based in Nigeria. It greets would-be readers with a series of suspicious pop-up ads for software.
While the pop-ups look bogus, the websites in this group do appear to do a brisk business in programmatic ads, which are advertisements placed through large-scale automated ad buys rather than a direct relationship between particular websites and advertisers. Many feature an abundance of banners administered by popular programmatic ad servers like Criteo and Sharethrough. (Neither Criteo nor Sharethrough responded to requests for comment.) DoubleVerify’s report suggests that the Synthetic Echo operators chose sports as one of the lead content categories specifically because it’s considered more brand-safe than hard news.
Programmatic ads from a number of prominent companies, including tech stalwarts like Asana and Oracle, ecommerce bigwig Net-A-Porter, makeup giant Sephora, and resort chain Kalahari Resorts, appeared while WIRED was monitoring these websites. None of these companies responded to requests for comment.
At a moment when trust in media has plummeted and many news outlets have seen revenue decline, this type 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.
Source : Wired
