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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 him, so WIRED had no way of making contact. (All three websites were registered by the domain management company Namecheap, as was a site impersonating CBS News that DoubleVerify suspected of being in the Synthetic Echo network.)
Bad actors have tried to piggyback off successful media outlets by republishing their work without permission many years. Now, however, AI tools are allowing variations of this pattern to proliferate at a newly accelerated pace. “This kind of low-quality content isn’t really new,” says Saporta. “But it’s much easier to replicate and scale with these current tools.”
The number of slop AI websites has increased dramatically year over year after generative AI tools exploded in popularity in 2023. Last February, shortly after WIRED first began reporting on the rise of AI content mills, the media guard company NewsGuard. had identified 725 “news and information sites” full of AI content. From January 2025, it had identified at least 1,150 of these sites.
“The volume has grown,” says Shouvik Paul, chief operating officer of AI detection company Copyleaks. “A lot of these are foreign operations, and very shady operations, so how do you even keep up?”
To make things more confusing for readers, a number of mainstream media sites have experienced with the publication of AI-generated news articles. (Sports Illustrated itself ran content allegedly generated by AI, which its parent company said was provided by a third party.) In other cases, domain name hustlers they have acquired the URL of media properties that have fallen on hard times and resurrected them as AI content mills, sometimes replacing their first sound journalism with robotic pablum.
Some of these sites are already enkindling confusion of the real world; in October, an SEO content mill posted an AI-generated ad for a Halloween parade in Dublin, Ireland. Although there was no such event planned, a crowd of revelers showed up expecting festivities.
Paul from Copyleaks described the way some of these websites have slipped in the brand identity of real outlets to sell junk as “a sort of phishing”. In some cases, these sites appear to be actual phishing efforts. One of the sites in the DoubleVerify ring identified was designed to impersonate a Fox news outlet based in Nigeria. It greets prospective readers with a series of suspicious pop-up ads for software.
While the pop-ups look fake, the websites in this group seem to do a brisk business in programmatic ads, which are ads placed through large-scale automated ad buys rather than a direct relationship between particular websites and advertisers. Many feature an abundance 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 operators have chosen sports as one of the main content categories in particular because it is considered safer of the brand than a 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 as WIRED monitored these sites. web. None 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 drop, this kind of slop content mill ring is a double whammy. Pollute the information ecosystem with junk and stolen writing, and siphon programmatic advertising revenue from legitimate content producers.
