Aurich Lawson | Getty Images | Christina Warren
In one of the most egregiously unethical uses of AI we’ve seen, a web advertising company has re-created some defunct, classic tech blogs like The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) and iLounge by mimicking the bylines of the websites’ former writers and publishing AI-generated content under their names.
The Verge reported on the fiasco in detail, including speaking to Christina Warren, a former writer for TUAW who now works at GitHub. Warren took to the social media platform Threads yesterday to point out that someone had re-launched TUAW at its original domain and populated it with fake content allegedly written by her and other past TUAW staff. Some of the content simply reworded articles that originally appeared on TUAW, while other articles tied real writers’ names to new, AI-generated articles about current events.
(Disclosure: I worked with Warren at Mashable several years ago, and before that, I also worked at the original parent company of TUAW.)
TUAW was shut down in 2015, but its intellectual property and domain name continued to be owned by Yahoo. A Hong Kong-based web advertising firm named Web Orange Limited claims to have purchased the domain and brand name but not the content.
The domain name still carries some value in terms of Google ranking, so Web Orange Limited seems to have relaunched the site and then used AI summarization tools to reword the original content and publish it under the original authors’ names. (It did the same with another classic Apple blog, iLounge.)
The site also includes author bios, which are generic and may have been generated, and they are accompanied by author photos that don’t look anything like the real writers.
The Verge found that some of these same photos have appeared in other places, like web display ads for iPhone cases and dating websites. They may have been AI-generated, though the company has also been caught reusing photos of real people without permission in other contexts.
At first, some of Web Orange Limited’s websites named Haider Ali Khan, an Australian currently residing in Dubai, as the owner of the company. Khan’s own website identified him as “an independent cyber security analyst” and “long-time advocate for web security” who also runs a web hosting company, and who “started investing in several technology reporting websites” and “manages and runs several news blogs such as the well-known Apple tech-news blog iLounge.”
However, mentions of his name were removed from the websites today, and the details on his personal website have apparently been taken offline.
Warren emailed the company, threatening legal action. After she did that, the byline was changed to what we can only assume is a made-up name—”Mary Brown.” The same goes for many of the other author names on Web Orange Limited’s websites.
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