Someone is turning old Apple blogs into AI content factories with fake authors
Remember TUAW, or The Unofficial Apple Weblog? It was once a popular Apple blog which was shut down in 2015, but it was recently brought back from the dead — in the worst possible way.
TUAW is now, it appears, an AI-generated content factory bringing Apple-related “news.” According to the site’s “About Us” section, the site was acquired by a company called “Web Orange Limited” from Yahoo “without its original content.” Its mission? “To continue providing Apple enthusiasts and tech professionals with authoritative and engaging content.”
The problem with that is that the company has falsified bios from authors which wrote for the site more than a decade ago. Christina Warren, which used to write for TUAW (disclaimer: Warren also later wrote for Mashable; she is now a Senior Dev Advocate at GitHub), noticed that her name and bio was used on the new TUAW site with a different, obviously fake author image.
The site also falsified names and bios of other former TUAW writers in a similar fashion.
Following Warren’s discovery, the name next to her fake bio was changed to “Mary Brown,” and other fake bios were also modified.
As noted by Ars Technica, the same company also acquired old Apple blog iLounge, giving it a similar treatment.
While buying an old news site’s domain and populating it with AI-generated articles isn’t exactly illegal (it would be nice if it were clearly communicated on the site, though), signing actual, human, authors under this content and falsifying their bios is extremely sleazy at the very least, and potentially grounds for a lawsuit.
At best, one has to wonder about the quality of content on this site, given the treatment it gave to its former authors (hint: we’ve read some of it, and it’s not good, meaning it’s clearly AI-generated crap).
The entire endeavor is likely an SEO play designed to extract some value from these old, still very recognizable names and web domains, but we’d much rather see these old sites laid to rest than resurrected in this, egregiously unethical way.
