Next time you check sports news online, double check the URL.
For example, a headline like “Red Sox forced to hand over risk to Alex Bregman for $427 million superstar” looks quite ordinary – and at first glance appears to come from BBC Sports. However, upon closer inspection, you may discover that you’ve come across a counterfeit called “BBCSportss” that has been discontinued from Sports Illustrated. Elsewhere on this site you’ll also find stories that aren’t stolen directly from another writer, but instead read like a garbled remix of what other sports bloggers have written and appear to be AI-generated.
DoubleVerify, a software platform that tracks online advertising and media analytics, recently analyzed a collection of more than 200 websites filled with a mix of seemingly AI-generated content and snippets of news articles copied from real media. The analysis found that these sites often chose domain names and designed their sites to mimic sites operated by established media brands, including ESPN, NBC, Fox, CBS and the BBC. Many of these proxy sites look like legitimate sports news sites.
“We have not approved the content of BBC Sports and, in fact, it is plagiarized,” says Sports Illustrated spokeswoman Paige Graham.
“We’re seeing fraud rates double or triple year over year,” says DoubleVerify CMO Dan Slivjanovski. Much of these scams focus on bots that consume content rather than create it, boosting website views to generate unearned advertising revenue by giving the impression of an enhance in readership. However, DoubleVerify has also seen an enhance in AI click farm schemes, where networks of websites are filled with AI-generated content designed to siphon both real readers and advertising revenue away from real outlets.
DoubleVerify observed that this ring, which it calls “Synthetic Echo,” was likely copying content from other websites, using AI-generated stories, or a combination of both. “It’s not even fake news. It’s just a random coincidence,” says Gilit Saporta, who runs the company’s fraud lab. While this isn’t the only pattern of sloppiness Saporta has observed, it considers this case particularly noteworthy because of the obvious interconnectedness of many of its offerings, often involving the same web design choices across sites.
WIRED asked Reality Defender, a deepfake detection startup, to analyze samples of websites from three Synthetic Echo domains. In reviewing recent articles from “NBC Sportz”, it was determined that the content was written by people but stolen from legitimate media sites, with their names removed and credited to “nbcsportz” instead.
One such website defrauded in this way was the Detroit Free Press, which confirmed that it had not consented to the republication of its authors’ works. “This content is not licensed by the Detroit Free Press and does not represent our brand or our journalism,” says Detroit Free Press spokesperson Lark-Marie Antón. The company plans to take legal action.
For the other two domains tested by Reality Defender, NBCSport.co.uk and BBCSportss.co.uk, all sample stories appeared to be AI-generated, confirming DoubleVerify’s findings.