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NBC Sportz did not respond to a request for comment. Neither NBCSport.co.uk nor BBCSportss.co.uk has an email address or other contact information associated with them, so WIRED had no way of contacting them. (All three websites were registered by the domain name management company Namecheap, as was a site impersonating CBS News that DoubleVerify suspects is inside the Synthetic Echo network.)
Bad actors have tried to cover up successful broadcasts by reprinting their work without permission many years. Now, AI tools allow the evolution of this plot to increase at a faster pace. “Things as low as this are not unusual,” Saporta said. “But it’s easy to replicate and scale up with these modern tools.”
The number of AI slop websites has increased year by year since artificial intelligence tools exploded in popularity in 2023. Last February, shortly after WIRED began reporting on the rise of AI mills, media monitoring company NewsGuard. he had noticed 725 “news and information” powered by AI. By January 2025, it was done to be known at least 1,150 of these sites.
“Volume is up,” said Shouvik Paul, chief operating officer at AI intelligence firm Copyleaks. “A lot of this is outside work, and it’s useless, so what do you do?”
To make things even more confusing for readers, several popular websites have it to try and publish AI-generated stories. (Sports Illustrated itself ran content it claimed was AI-generated, which its parent company said was supplied by a third party.) In some cases, domain-name hustlers they bought social media URLs that have fallen during the hard times and he resurrected them like AI mills, they sometimes ditch their old journalism and robotic pablum.
Some of these sites are already causing chaos in the world; in October, SEO mills wrote an announcement made by AI at the Halloween parade in Dublin, Ireland. Even though there was no such ceremony planned, the crowd of party goers arrived in anticipation of the festivities.
Copyleaks’ Paul described how some of these sites identified themselves as real retailers to sell junk as “kind of like phishing.” Sometimes, these sites look like they are creating a real scam. One of the sites in the popular DoubleVerify ring was created to imitate Fox News’ live broadcast in Nigeria. It greets potential readers with a series of dubious software ads.
Although it may seem fake, the sites in this group appear to be doing business actively in programmatic advertising, which is advertising delivered through large ad buys rather than direct links between other sites and advertisers. Most of them have a lot of ads that are managed by popular ad servers like Criteo and Sharethrough. (Neither Criteo nor Sharethrough responded to a request for comment.) DoubleVerify’s report suggests that Synthetic Echo gamers chose games as one of the top categories mainly because they are considered safer than serious issues.
Software ads from several prominent companies, including tech giants Asana and Oracle, ecommerce giant Net-A-Porter, makeup giant Sephora, and resort Kalahari Resorts, appeared when WIRED monitored the sites. None of the companies responded to requests for comment.
At a time when trust in the media has plummeted and many news outlets have seen a decline in revenue, this type of slop content mill ring is doubly surprising. It pollutes the environment with junk and pirated content, and siphons off advertising revenue from legitimate content creators.
