That sports news story you clicked on may be an AI slouch

NBC Sportz did not respond to requests for comment. Neither NBCSport.co.uk nor BBCSportss.co.uk have an email address or other contact information publicly associated with them, so WIRED had no way of contacting them. (All three websites were registered by the domain management company Namecheap, as well as a CBS News impersonation site that DoubleVerify suspects is on the Synthetic Echo network.)

Bad actors have tried to take advantage of successful media outlets by republishing their work without permission many years. Now, however, artificial intelligence tools are allowing variations of this pattern to spread at new accelerated rates. “This kind of low-quality content is nothing new,” Saporta says. “But it’s much easier to replicate and scale with these current tools.”

The number of AI websites has skyrocketed in the 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 company NewsGuard had identified 725 “news and information sites” full of AI content. Until January 2025 there was identified at least 1150 of these sites.

“The volume has increased,” says Shuvik Paul, COO of AI detection company Copyleaks. “A lot of them are overseas operated and very shady operations, so how do you even keep up the pace?”

To make matters more confusing for readers, a number of mainstream media sites have done so experimented with by publishing AI-generated news articles. (Sports Illustrated itself released allegedly AI-generated content that its parent company said was provided by a third party.) In other cases, domain name scammers have purchased the URLs of media properties that have fallen on hard times and resurrect them as AI content mills, sometimes replacing their previous sound journalism with robotic pablum.

Some of these sites are already causing confusion in the real world; in October SEO content mill post an AI generated message for the Halloween Parade in Dublin, Ireland. Although there was no such event planned, throngs of revelers showed up expecting festivities.

Paul from Copyleaks described the way some of these websites fit into the brand identity of real junk shops as “sort of like phishing”. In some cases, these sites appear to be making an actual phishing effort. One of the sites in the ring, identified by DoubleVerify, was designed to mimic a Fox news channel based in Nigeria. It greets prospective readers with a series of suspicious software pop-up ads.

Although the pop-ups appear fake, the websites in this group appear to do a brisk business with programmatic ads, which are ads placed through large-scale automated ad buys rather than a direct link between specific websites and advertisers. Many include an abundance of banners administered 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 chose sports as one of their top content categories specifically because it is considered more brand-safe than hard news.

Programmatic ads from a number of prominent companies, including tech leaders Asana and Oracle, e-commerce giant Net-A-Porter, makeup giant Sephora and resort chain Kalahari Resorts, appeared while WIRED monitored these websites. Neither of those companies responded to requests for comment.

At a time when trust in the media has plummeted and many news outlets have seen revenue decline, this type of content slush mill is a double whammy. It pollutes the information ecosystem with junk and stolen content and drains programmatic advertising revenue from legitimate content producers.