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 getting in touch. (All three websites were registered by the domain management company Namecheap, as was a CBS News impersonation site that DoubleVerify suspected was on the Synthetic Echo network.)
Bad actors have tried for years to destroy successful media by republishing their work without permission. However, AI tools now allow changes to this design to increase at a new pace. “This kind of low-quality content isn’t really new,” says Saporta. “But with these current tools it’s much easier to replicate and scale.”
Since generative AI tools became popular in 2023, the number of AI slop websites has increased dramatically over the past year. Last February, shortly after WIRED first began reporting on the rise of AI content production, media watchdog NewsGuard identified 725 “news.” and information sites” full of artificial intelligence content. By January 2025, it had identified at least 1,150 of these sites.
“The volume is up,” says Shouvik Paul, chief operating officer at AI detection firm Copyleaks. “A lot of this is done by foreigners and very questionable operations, so how can you 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 AI-generated content, which its parent company said was provided by a third party.) In other cases, domain name intruders have purchased the URLs of media properties that have fallen on hard times and They have revived them again. As AI content factories, they sometimes replace their previous journalism with robotic pablum.
Some of these sites are already causing real-world confusion. In October, an SEO content factory published an announcement for a Halloween parade in Dublin, Ireland. Although such an event was not planned, a crowd of partygoers were waiting for the celebration.
Paul from Copyleaks described the way some of these websites impersonate real media brands to sell junk as “like phishing”. In some cases, these sites appear to be making genuine phishing attempts. One of the sites in the DoubleVerify authentication loop was designed to mimic a Fox News outlet based in Nigeria. It greets potential readers with a series of dubious pop-up ads for the software.
While the pop-ups look fake, the websites in this group appear to be doing a brisk business in programmatic advertising, which is advertising placed through large-scale automated ad buys rather than a direct relationship between websites and specific advertisers. Many of them have a large number of banners served by popular programmatic ad servers such as Criteo and Sharethrough. (Neither Criteo nor Sharethrough responded to requests for comment.) The DoubleVerify report shows that Synthetic Echo operators have chosen sports as one of their primary content categories, particularly because it is considered more brand-safe than hard news.
Programmatic ads from a number of prominent companies, including tech giants Asana and Oracle, e-commerce giant Net-A-Porter, cosmetics giant Sephora, and resort chain Kalahari Resorts, appeared when WIRED monitored the websites. None of the companies responded to requests for comment.
At a moment when trust in the media has declined and many news outlets have seen revenue decline, these types of slop content production loops are a double whammy. It pollutes the information ecosystem with spam and plagiarism, draining legitimate content producers of programmatic advertising revenue.
