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 them, so WIRED had no way of contacting them. (All three websites registered by domain management company Namecheap, as well as a site impersonating CBS News that DoubleVerify is suspected of being inside the Synthetic Echo network.)
Bad actors have tried to block successful media outlets by republishing their work without permission for years. Now, however, AI tools allow the diversity of this system to expand at a newly accelerated pace. “This kind of low-quality content doesn’t really take off,” Saporta said. “But it’s very easy to replicate and scale with these current tools.”
The number of AI slop websites has grown exponentially every year since AI productivity tools exploded in popularity in 2023. Last February, shortly after WIRED began reporting on the rise of AI content mills, media watchdog NewsGuard identified “725 stories”. and websites” full of AI content. By January 2025, it had identified at least 1,150 of these sites.
“Volume has increased,” said Shouvik Paul, chief operating officer of AI detection company Copyleaks. “A lot of this is working in other countries, and it’s very shady, so how do you go about it?”
To make things more confusing for readers, a number of mainstream media sites have attempted to publish AI-generated news articles. (Sports Illustrated itself has hosted content allegedly generated by AI, which its parent company said was supplied by an outsider.) In some cases, domain name hustlers have purchased URLs for media sites that have fallen on hard times and resurrected them. as AI content machines, sometimes replacing their previously sounding journalism with robotic pablum.
Some of these sites are already causing real-world confusion; in October, an SEO content mill posted an AI-powered advertisement for a Halloween parade in Dublin, Ireland. Although no such event was planned, crowds of spectators awaited the festivities.
Copyleaks’ Paul described how some of these websites impersonate real stores to sell junk as “a form of phishing.” In some cases, these sites appear to be making genuine phishing attempts. One of the sites inside the ring DoubleVerify identified was designed to impersonate a Fox news outlet based in Nigeria. It greets readers with a series of suspicious software pop-up ads.
Although the scams look fake, the websites in this group appear to be doing brisk business in programmatic ads, which are ads placed through automated ad purchases rather than direct relationships between specific websites and advertisers. Many include an abundance of banners managed by popular programmatic ad servers such as Criteo and Sharethrough. (Neither Criteo nor Sharethrough responded to requests for comment.) The DoubleVerify report suggests that Synthetic Echo operators chose sports as one of the leading content categories mainly because it is considered safer than hard news.
Program ads from several prominent companies, including tech giants like Asana and Oracle, ecommerce bigwig Net-A-Porter, makeup giant Sephora, and resort chain Kalahari Resorts, appeared while WIRED monitored these websites. None of these companies responded to requests for comment.
At a time when trust in the media has declined and many news outlets are seeing a decline in revenue, this kind of slop content mill ring is a double whammy. It pollutes the information ecosystem with spam and plagiarism, and captures regulated advertising revenue from legitimate content producers.