iLounge and the Unofficial Apple Weblog Are Back As Unethical AI Content Farms 11
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Samuel Axon: 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.
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.
The company likely tried to use the original authors' names as part of an SEO play; Google tracks the names of authors and gives them authority rankings on specific topics as another layer on top of a website's own authority. That way, Google can try to respond to user queries with results written by people who have built strong reputations in the users' areas of interest. It also helps Google surface authors who are experts on a topic but who write for multiple websites, which is common among freelance writers. The websites are still operational, even though the most arguably egregious breach of ethics -- the false use of real people's names -- has been addressed in many cases.
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.
The company likely tried to use the original authors' names as part of an SEO play; Google tracks the names of authors and gives them authority rankings on specific topics as another layer on top of a website's own authority. That way, Google can try to respond to user queries with results written by people who have built strong reputations in the users' areas of interest. It also helps Google surface authors who are experts on a topic but who write for multiple websites, which is common among freelance writers. The websites are still operational, even though the most arguably egregious breach of ethics -- the false use of real people's names -- has been addressed in many cases.
you know the old saying (Score:1)
Sad to see (Score:3, Insightful)
Some of these websites used to be really well respected, obviously why they were bought by someone I can only exists as a being of pure Scam... now wearing the respected sites like a skinsuit.
The hack job is bad enough if I were Google I would ban them from every appearing in a search result.
Re:Sad to see (Score:4, Informative)
Oh theres a lot of this going on. Academic publishing has been going through a drama of late where unscrupulous operators have been buying up domains of defunct academic journals and then using them as shitty web content farms of fake academia either for SEO purposes or as pay-to-publish nonsense for failed academics looking to get citation credits for debunkable nonsense that would normally get caught and rejected by peer review in the original journals that the scammers are domain squatting.
And then theres the whole npm fiasco with pollyfill's website getting taken over and redirected to phishing type nonsense.
Its not all AI, but AI is making this shit much harder to catch and deflect.
Khan! (Score:2)
Khaaaaaaaan!
Posing as humans (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Its not. The articles have made up nonsense in them. Lead article on the fake TUAW is a review of the iphone 17.
Current iphone gen is iPhone 15. The iphone 16 is due sept or october, and the 17 is anyones guess. The sites a concept of shit bot-scraped from other sites and just LLMs going hog wild with hallucinations.
Literally nothing there is ethical.
Re: (Score:2)
Gets worse (Score:2)
MacRumors revealed that much of the “new” content is basically just a thesaurus table rewrite of articles published by MacRumors or 9to5Mac, oftentimes with the pixel-for-pixel copyrighted images that those organizations commissioned—pictures from their photographers, renders based on leaked product specs, etc.—being used directly without modification.
This company also used AI to retroactively fill in old links from 10 and 20 years ago that still show up in search results. Originally
TUAW (Score:2)
Hawk TUAW, spit on that thang!
So no different from here? (Score:2)