Shady company relaunches popular old tech blogs, steals writers’ identities

Enlarge / Professional writers’ names were attached to AI content they had nothing to do with. (credit: 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.)