NBC Sportz did not respond to a request for comment. Neither NBCSport.co.uk nor BBCSportss.co.uk have published email addresses or other contact information associated with them, so WIRED was unable to contact them. (All three sites are registered by the domain name management company Namecheap, and there is also a copycat CBS News site that DoubleVerify suspects belongs to the Synthetic Echo network.)

For years, bad actors have tried to take advantage of successful media organizations by republishing their work without permission. Now, though, artificial intelligence tools are allowing variations of the scheme to proliferate at a new accelerated rate. "This type of low-quality content is nothing new," Saporta said. "But it's much easier to replicate and scale with current tools."

Since the explosive popularity of generative AI tools in 2023, the number of AI spam websites has increased dramatically year by year. Last February, shortly after WIRED first reported on the rise of AI content factories, media monitoring firm NewsGuard found 725 "news" and information sites" filled with AI content. By January 2025, it had identified at least 1,150 Such sites.

“The numbers have increased,” said Shouvik Paul, chief operating officer of Copyleaks, an AI detection company. “A lot of them are foreign-run and very shady, so how do you keep up?”

To further confuse readers, some mainstream media sites have tried publishing AI-generated news articles. (Sports Illustrated itself runs purportedly AI-generated content, which its parent company says is provided by third parties.) In other cases, domain scammers have purchased the URLs of troubled media properties and converted them to Resurrected as an AI content factory, sometimes replacing their previously sound news coverage with the bot Palum.

Some of these sites have caused real-world mayhem; in October, an SEO content mill posted an AI-generated announcement for a Halloween parade in Dublin, Ireland. Although no such event is planned, throngs of revelers are looking forward to the festivities.

Copyleaks' Paul describes the way some of these sites use the branding of real stores to peddle junk as "a bit like phishing." In some cases, these sites appear to be conducting genuine phishing campaigns. One site in the network discovered by DoubleVerify was designed to imitate a Fox News outlet based in Nigeria. It greets potential readers with a series of questionable software pop-up ads.

While the pop-ups look fake, the group of sites does appear to be active in programmatic advertising, which is ads served through large-scale automated ad buys rather than a direct relationship between a specific site and an advertiser. Many ads feature large numbers 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 the Synthetic Echo operator chose sports as one of its primary content categories, specifically because it is considered safer than hard news.

When Wired monitored the sites, programmatic ads emerged from a number of well-known companies, including tech giants like Asana and Oracle, e-commerce giant Net-A-Porter, cosmetics giant Sephora and resort chain Kalahari Resorts. None of the companies responded to requests for comment.

At a time when trust in the media is plummeting and many news outlets are experiencing declining revenue, this type of spam mill is a double whammy. It pollutes the information ecosystem with junk and stolen text, and siphons programmatic advertising revenue away from legitimate content producers.