NBC Sports did not respond to requests for comment. Neither NBCSport.co.uk nor BBCSportss.co.uk have an email address or other contact information publicly linked, so WIRED had no way to get in touch. (All three websites were registered by domain management company Namecheap, as well as a site imitating CBS News that DoubleVerify suspected of being within the synthetic echo network.)
Bad actors have attempted to overtake successful media outlets by republishing their work without permission. many yearsNow, however, AI tools allow changes to this plan to proceed at a new accelerated pace. “This kind of low-quality content isn't really new,” Saporta says. “But it's much easier to replicate and scale with these existing tools.”
The number of AI slope websites has grown rapidly year over year since the popularity of generic AI tools increased in 2023. Last February, when WIRED first began reporting on the rise of AI content mills, media watchdog company NewsGuard said had recognized 725 “news and information sites” are loaded with AI content. By January 2025, it had Identified At least 1,150 of these sites.
“The volumes have increased,” says Shouvik Paul, chief operating officer of AI detection company CopyLeaks. “A lot of these are operated overseas, and are very shady operations, so how do you sustain that?”
To further confuse matters for readers, several mainstream media sites have Use Along with publishing AI-generated news articles. (Sports Illustrated itself reportedly ran AI-generated content, which its parent company has said was provided by a third party.) In other cases, Domain-Name Hustlers Have purchased URLs of media properties that have fallen on hard times and revived them As AI content mills, sometimes their previously sound journalism is replaced with robotic pablum.
Some of these sites are already causing confusion in the real world; In October, get an SEO content AI-generated announcement posted For the Halloween Parade in Dublin, Ireland. Although no such event was planned, crowds of revelers turned out in anticipation of the celebration.
Paul of CopyLeaks described how some of these websites were impersonating the brand identities of genuine outlets in order to sell junk “like phishing”. In some cases, these sites appear to be genuine phishing attempts. One of the sites identified within the DoubleVerify ring was designed to mimic the Nigeria-based Fox News outlet. It welcomes prospective readers with a series of suspicious pop-up advertisements for software.
While the pop-ups appear fraudulent, websites in this group appear to do a brisk business in programmatic advertising, which is advertising delivered largely through automated ad buying rather than direct relationships between particular websites and advertisers. Many contain an abundance of banners administered by popular programmatic ad servers like Criteo and Sharethrough. (Neither Criteo nor ShareThru responded to requests for comment.) Double Verify reports that Synthetic Echo operators specifically chose sports as one of the key content categories because it was compared to hard news. Considered more brand-safe.
Programmatic ads from several major companies, including tech giants like Asana and Oracle, ecommerce giant Net-a-Porter, makeup giant Sephora, and resort chain Kalahari Resorts, appeared while WIRED was monitoring these websites. None of these companies responded to requests for comment.
At a time when trust in the media has diminished and many news outlets have seen their revenues decline, this type of poor content mill is a double whammy. It pollutes the information ecosystem with junk and stolen writing, and it siphons off programmatic advertising revenue from legitimate content producers.