That Sports News Story You Clicked on Could Be AI Slop

NBC Sports 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 there was no way to contact WIRED. (All three websites were registered by domain management company Namechip, as was a site impersonating CBS News that Double Verify suspected of being in the synthetic echo network.)

Bad actors have tried to piggyback successful media outlets by republishing their work without permission many years. Now, though, AI tools allow for variations on this scheme at a new 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.”

Since the popularity of generative AI tools exploded in 2023, the number of AI slop websites has grown exponentially over the years. Last February, shortly after WIRED first began reporting on the rise of AI content mills, media watchdog company NewsGuard identified 725 “news and information sites” filled with AI content. By January 2025, it was identified At least 1,150 of these sites.

“The volume has gone up,” said Shovik Paul, chief operations officer at AI detection company Copelix. “Many of these are foreign-run, and very shady operations, so how do you keep going?”

To make matters more confusing for readers, there are several mainstream media sites to test With the publication of AI-generated news articles. (Sports Illustrated itself runs the purported AI-generated content, which its parent company says is provided by a third party.) In other cases, Domain-name hustler Media has purchased URLs of properties that have fallen on hard times and resurrect them As AI content mills, sometimes replacing their previously good journalism with robotic pablum.

Some of these sites are already creating real-world distractions; In October, an SEO content mill Posted an AI-generated announcement For a Halloween parade in Dublin, Ireland. Although no such event was planned, many visitors were present in anticipation of the festivities.

Copelix’s Paul describes the way some of these websites use the original outlet’s brand identity to peddle rubbish as “like phishing”. In some cases, these sites appear to be actual phishing attempts One site in the ring identified as DoubleVerify was designed to impersonate a Fox News outlet based in Nigeria. It greets readers with a series of suspicious pop-up ads for software

Although the pop-ups appear bogus, this group of websites appears to do a brisk business in programmatic advertising, which is placement of ads through large-scale automated ad buys rather than direct relationships between specific websites and advertisers. Many include an abundance of banners served by popular programmatic ad servers such as Criteo and ShareThrough. (Neither Criteo nor ShareThrough responded to requests for comment.) DoubleVerify’s report suggests synthetic echo operators chose sports as one of the main content categories because it is considered more brand-safe than hard news.

Programmatic advertising from several prominent companies, including Asana and Oracle, ecommerce bigwig Net-A-Porter, makeup giant Sephora, and resort chain Kalahari Resorts, while WIRED was monitoring these websites. None of these companies responded to requests for comment.

At a time when trust in the media has plummeted and revenues for many news outlets have plummeted, such sloppy content mill rings are a double whammy. It pollutes the information ecosystem with junk and plagiarized content, and it cuts off programmatic advertising revenue from legitimate content creators.