Read This: How one company got caught pumping out AI ‘journalism’
At this point, it’s not news that AI-generated content is basically just plagiarizing people who actually create things. Still, a new report from Futurism presents one pretty damning example focused on the “AI slop empire” called Brown Brothers Media. The 7,500+ word report by authors Maggie Harrison Dupré and Jon Christian is certainly worth reading in full, as it presents a compelling case that the company has exploited everyone from gig writers in Southeast Asia to Google itself in order to rack up more page views than NPR and nearly as many as The Washington Post every month.
Basically, BBM’s business model worked by buying up websites and blogs that had already been successful for years of publishing, you know, human-written writing. Some cited in Futurism‘s report are Space Daily, Silicon Canals, and VegOut, with the founder of at least the latter site publicly decrying what happened to the site she founded. (“I ran it for about ten years and then sold it last summer,” said founder Maggie Ortlieb. “Unfortunately, the new owners turned it into just another AI-written content website, so not really the direction I had in mind.”) But the extractive practices of BBM are truly global. Founders Justin, Lachlan, and Brendan Brown were originally from Australia but set up shop in Vietnam for the relatively cheap cost of living and labor. Many of their gig workers were from the country or others in Southeast Asia like the Philippines, and essentially were tasked with pumping out cheap content before AI got good enough to fake it for them. With the volume of content and the reputation of the existing sites, BBM was able to rank highly enough in Google (at least, for a time) to rack up a ton of page views.
Though the company copped to varying degrees to using AI to assist its writing, Futurism determined that much of the sites were 100% AI-generated, often publishing the same things over and over. What’s more, once the site started investigating BBM, much of the content suddenly disappeared. You can read about the whole saga, including how BBM invented fake authors with impossible continuity errors, here.
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