NBC Sports 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 to get in touch. (All three of these websites were registered by the domain management company Namecheap, as was a site impersonating CBS News that double-verifies suspected to be inside the synthetic echo network.)
Bad artists have tried to shut down successful media outlets by republishing their work without permission many years. Now, however, AI tools allow variations of this scheme to proliferate at a new accelerated pace. “This kind of low-quality content isn’t really new,” says Sporta. “But it’s much easier to replicate and scale with these existing tools.”
Since generative AI tools exploded in popularity in 2023 the number of AI slope websites has grown exponentially year over year. Last February, shortly after WIRED first began reporting on the rise of AI content mills, media watchdog company NewsGuard was identified 725 “news and information sites” filled with AI content. By January 2025, c identified At least 1,150 of these sites.
“The volume has increased,” said Shavik Paul, chief operating officer of AI detection company CopyLeaks. “Many of these are foreign-run, and very sophisticated operations, so how do you keep up?”
To make matters more confusing for readers, there are many mainstream media sites Experimented Along with publishing AI-generated news articles. (Sports Illustrated itself reportedly runs AI-generated content, which its parent company says was provided by a third party.) In other cases, Domain-name hustler has bought URLs of media properties that hard times and Made them alive AI content mills, sometimes replacing their previously good journalism with robotic pablum.
Some of these sites are already causing real-world confusion; In October, an SEO content mill Posted an AI-generated announcement for a Halloween parade in Dublin, Ireland. Although no such event was planned, throngs of devotees showed up in anticipation of the festivities.
CopyLeaks’ Paul described the way some of these websites presented junk on the brand identity of genuine outlets as “like phishing”. In some cases, these sites appear to be genuine phishing attempts. One of the sites within the ring DoubleVerify identified was designed to impersonate a Fox News outlet based in Nigeria. It greets readers with a series of suspicious pop-up ads for software.
While the pop-ups appear fake, websites in this group appear to do a brisk business in programmatic advertising, which is advertising placed through large-scale automated ad buys rather than a direct relationship between specific websites and advertisers. Some have a plethora of banners managed by popular programmatic ad servers such as Criteo and ShareThrough. (Neither Criteo nor ShareThrough responded to requests for comment.) DoubleVerify’s report suggests that Synthetic Echo operators chose sports as one of the main content categories because it is considered more brand-safe than hard news. .
WIRED’s monitoring of these websites revealed programmatic ads from several major companies, including tech giants like Asana and Oracle, e-commerce bigwig Net-a-Porter, makeup giant Sephora, and resort chain Kalahari Resort. None of these companies responded to requests for comment.
At a moment when trust in the media has plummeted and many news outlets have seen revenue decline, this kind of sloppy content mill ring is a double whammy. It pollutes the information ecosystem with junk and plagiarism, and it cuts off programmatic ad revenue from legitimate content producers.
