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 publicly associated with it, so WIRED had no way to get in touch. (All three sites are registered by domain management company Namecheap, as well as a CBS News parody site that DoubleVerify suspects is in the aggregated Echo network.)
Bad actors have successfully tried to take advantage of the media by republishing their work without permission. many years. Now, however, AI tools allow variations of this scheme to evolve at new speeds. “This type of low-quality content is not really new,” Saporta said. “But it's much easier to replicate and scale with these existing tools.”
The number of steep AI 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 producers, media monitoring company NewsGuard has been determined 725 “news and information pages” filled with AI content. By January 2025, it was available identify at least 1,150 of these sites.
“The volume has increased,” said Shouvik Paul, chief executive of AI detection company Copyleaks. “Much of this is foreign-run and very shady, so how can you keep up?”
To make the issue more confusing for readers, some mainstream media sites have tested with the publication of AI-generated articles. (Sports Illustrated itself has run content allegedly generated by AI, which its parent company says is provided by a third party.) domain name buyers bought URLs of media properties that had fallen on hard times and revived them as AI content producers, sometimes replacing their previously solid journalism with robotic pablum.
Some of these sites have caused confusion in the real world; in October, an SEO content producer posted an AI-generated message for the Halloween parade in Dublin, Ireland. Although no events were planned, crowds of revelers arrived in anticipation of the festival.
Paul of Copyleaks described the way some of these sites use the branding of real stores to peddle junk as “scam-like”. In some cases, these sites appear to be carrying out phishing attempts. One of the websites DoubleVerify identified was designed to imitate a Fox news outlet based in Nigeria. It greets readers with a series of suspicious pop-up ads about the software.
Although the pop-ups don't look real, sites in this group appear to do brisk business in programmatic ads, which are ads placed through large-scale automated ad buying rather than a direct relationship between specific sites and advertisers. Many sites have lots of banners managed by popular programmatic ad servers like Criteo and Sharethrough. (Neither Criteo nor Sharethrough responded to requests for comment.) DoubleVerify's report suggests that Synthetic Echo executives chose sports as one of its main content categories because it is considered brand-safe rather than confusing news.
Programmatic ads from a number of prominent companies, including well-known tech companies like Asana and Oracle, e-commerce giant Net-A-Porter, makeup giant Sephora, and resort chain Kalahari Resorts, appeared while WIRED was monitoring these sites. None of these companies responded to requests for comment.
At a time when trust in the media has plummeted and many news organizations have seen their revenues decline, this type of sloppy content production is a double whammy. It pollutes the information ecosystem with spam and stolen articles, while siphoning off programmatic advertising revenue from legitimate content producers.