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.
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