Engagement farmers on TikTok are using AI to manipulate real arrest footage to show police officers kissing and groping arrestees being taken into custody.
The deepfakes, which were discovered by Copyleaks, are grotesque. The AI-manipulated videos are based on actual footage of arrests — which appear to have originally been filmed for reality TV shows like TLC’s “D.U.I.”— but have been altered to depict law enforcement officers kissing and sexually touching real women, as well as a few real men, who were pulled over. The arrestees are often shown wearing handcuffs and being held near, in, or against police cruisers as the fake sexual activity occurs.
These abusive deepfakes are then spliced in front of longer videos of the arrest, a tactic which suggests that the deepfakes were made to get scrolling users hooked so they watch the arrest videos through to the end.
“This is a disturbing example of how AI tools are being used to create deepfake versions of real content to drive attention and engagement on social media,” Copyleaks cofounder and CEO Alon Yamin said in a statement. “It’s important to remember that these videos feature real people — both police officers and citizens — who are being depicted doing things that never happened.”
“That’s concerning,” added Yamin, “for everyone featured and involved.”
In some of the videos, the people being kissed and groped are pictured smiling, implying that they’re willing participants in the sexual advances of police officers who are actively arresting them.
Some of the manipulated videos note the use of AI-generated content, and are additionally outfitted with a disclaimer claiming that the clips are for “entertainment use only with no harmful implication.” That disclaimer, though, rings extraordinarily hollow: sexualized deepfakes, created to manipulate media of real people without their consent, are implicitly harmful.
After we reached out, TikTok removed examples of the content that we specifically flagged, and pointed us to platform guidelines regarding clear labeling of realistic AI content.
A new report exposes thousands of scam websites flooding the web with AI-generated recipes.
In the report, Decrypt Ads — a startup that tracks the supply chains of online advertisements — identified more than two thousand websites that strongly appear to be AI slop farms masquerading as blogs run by real chefs and home cooks. These sites, the report found, are pumping fake recipes into search engines like Google as well as social media platforms such as Pinterest, often relying on sketchy Russian and Chinese adtech partners to monetize the operations.
It’s “common knowledge that publishers in certain niches are being openly deceptive about their owners and authors, using AI photos and fake back stories on their sites,” reads the report, which was published today. “Some of the most consistent growth in AI slop spreading across the internet has come from AI recipe websites.”
Security expert and Decrypt Ads researcher Zach Edwards told Futurism that he initially identified about 400 suspicious websites that seemed to be publishing AI-generated recipes under the names of fake chefs. Using “technical fingerprints,” he then found hundreds more sites associated with the suspicious domains he manually uncovered — bringing the tally up to roughly 2,100 different domains, many of which seem to be run by the same sloperators.
“We really approach this expecting these operators to try and hide their websites,” said Edwards. “These folks they don’t want people to know all of the websites they own.”
The slop recipe sites often have “aggressive” social media strategies, according to the report, with Edwards noting that the bogus brands are “super aggressive on Pinterest, super aggressive on Twitter, on Facebook.”
“Any place where there’s visual media,” he added, “you can expect these AI author people to be trying to drum up organic traffic.”
Among the most aggressive slop sites uncovered in the report is “AddCakes,” a baking site that claims it’s operated by a baker named “Elena.” Elena is described as a “busy mom who wanted to connect with my roots through baking, but got overwhelmed by complicated cake recipes and the pressure to make them look perfect.” But in an act of theft so bold that it’s comical, the character of Elena is clearly an AI-generated version of the extremely recognizable British actress Emily Blunt, who’s starred in hit movies like the 2006 “The Devil Wears Prada” and the 2018 “A Quiet Place.”
AddCakes is apparently either betting that no one will recognize AI-manipulated images of the famous celebrity, or banking that her face will attract readers. It’s even published photos depicting the Elena character in the kitchen cooking and sitting at a dinner table, surrounded by her fake, AI-generated family. According to location data from X-formerly-Twitter, the person behind the operation is based in Morocco. (Blunt doesn’t live in Morocco, and her representatives didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
Whatever you do, though, don’t trust the AI-generated Emily Blunt. As Edwards emphasized, websites working with Chinese and Russian adtech partners carry a privacy risk for consumers, as authoritarian regimes may look to hoover up valuable browsing data.
“This report is about publishers who are being deceptive. Their audiences could be impacted, advertisers are wasting money,” said Edwards. “But the underlying fact is also that if you load this website and you don’t block ads, your data is going to, basically, authoritarian countries.”
In other words, AI slop isn’t just choking the web with garbage. It can also come with security risks — and, at the end of the day, it’s built on fundamental dishonesty.
“Most of these AI recipe websites, when you look at those ‘about’ pages, the fake backstories that they’re putting together… this lady was a Michelin star chef and she worked at this fancy hotel or this place, and they’re basically saying that this expert not only wrote these recipes, but tested themselves. And it’s giving this air of, ‘Wow, you’re about to get a recipe from an expert. This has all been carefully vetted,'” said Edwards. “But none of these recipes have probably been cooked — zero of them by the actual owners or authors, and to me that’s the scary part.”
He added that many of these sites are likely scraping content ideas from real bloggers and creators who have actually taken the time, energy, and expertise to test, photograph, and publish real recipes. “These people are clearly not cooking their own recipes. They’re putting out sometimes dozens of recipes a day. It’s an automated publishing pipeline,” said the researcher. “It’s all a lie… and I think that the reason why we need to be holding AI publishers accountable is because they don’t care about their audience.”
An image published by a TikTok account called “WellWithHer” shows a selfie of an obviously AI-generated woman sitting in her bed, weeping. According to the image’s caption, which is written in the first-person, the woman spent six months “hiding” her GLP-1 “pens in her bag,” only for her secret use of the meds to be discovered by her sister.
“I hid my GLP-1 from my sister for 6 months… she just sent me this,” reads text overlaying the image. “I cried.”
The next image in the carousel is a screenshot of a locked iPhone screen, which shows a lengthy text from a sender saved as “Sis.”
“I saw the pens in your bag on Sunday and i didn’t say anything because i didn’t want you to feel judged. I’ve watched you hate yourself in photos since we were teenagers. If something is finally making you feel okay in your own body, i’m not going to be the person who makes you feel bad about it,” reads the text. “I’m so proud of you. And i’m sorry it took me this long to say it.”
Beneath the purported text message is another notification: a reminder from a mobile app called Enzo instructing the poster to take their GLP-1 shot.
“Time for your GLP-1 injection!” reads the notification, which features a cutesy cartoon cat as its mascot. “Log your dose to keep the streak.”
The same WellWithHer TikTok account is loaded with similar images crying AI-generated women sharing personal family stories about secretly taking GLP-1 weight loss injections like semaglutide and tirzepatide. Another post, for instance, shows an AI lady crying in her cubicle after purportedly receiving a text from daughter, “Emma,” who claims to have found her mom’s GLP-1 medicine “in the fridge” and is urging her to “pls don’t be embarrassed.”
“i know you think i don’t notice but you never get in the pictures with us and you didn’t come in the pool all summer,” the text continues. “i just want you to be in the pictures. also you have been way less tired lately and i like it. i’m proud of you. can we get tacos after practice. love you”
Below the text is another notification for Enzo, reminding the sobbing AI woman to take her GLP-1 shot.
“Time for your GLP-1 injection!” the notification chirps. “Log your dose to keep the streak.”
The psychology of the undisclosed ads is obvious and manipulative. The texts in the posts all offer variations of an emotional validation fantasy, in which loved ones of a GLP-1 taker, who may be feeling shameful or embarrassed, surprise them with love and support when they discover they’ve been taking the drugs. The messages, and the alleged GLP-1 users claiming to have received them, are clearly fake, and are designed to promote GLP-1-focused apps — yet aren’t being disclosed as advertisements, nor as AI-generated synthetic content.
Unfortunately, Enzo isn’t the only GLP-1 app being marketed through this style of manipulative synthetic content.
Over on another TikTok account, for example, a poster going by the name “Lara” uses a mix of stolen images of real influencers and AI-generated images — always of young women, some of whom are pictured crying — to market a completely different GLP-1 tracker called “DreamMe.”
In some posts, like “WellWithHer,” the account promotes a GLP-1 app called “DreamMe” by coupling weepy selfies with fake phony texts from family members offering words of support and understanding.
“I started GLP-1s without telling my father. Today he wrote this to me…” reads text overlaid on a selfie of a crying young woman.
On the next slide, sitting above a notification from DreamMe, is a text from “Dad.” His profile picture also appears to be AI-generated.
“I know you’ve been going through treatment, and I’m really worried about your health,” says the text. “With our family history of heart problems, it’s something that weighs on my mind. I’m so proud of you, and I’m really happy that you’re starting a new chapter.”
According to its website, “DreamMe” claims to provide users with their “new GLP-1 best friend” in the form of “Sushi,” a cartoon fish that helps keep track of GLP-1 meds. Its landing page features a handful of AI-generated women that the site bills as real customers who have shed weight with Sushi’s support.
Enzo’s unreality, in other words, doesn’t end with the TikTok content.
“Real journeys. Real members,” the page reads. “The numbers are theirs. The words are theirs. We just built the fish.”
The strange, heartstring-tugging posts used to promote Enzo and DreamMe are part of a larger trend on TikTok using fake AI-generated women to promote a range of dubious wellness apps. (In fact, some posts across accounts are so alike that different fake women have different-but-strikingly-similar images of dogs with Crocs on their heads as their phone wallpapers.)
Take “Lauren<3,” a TikTok poster portrayed as a young woman publicly posting through her sudden breakup. Blonde and clearly AI-generated, the account published slideshow after slideshow of “Lauren” — in a bathtub, in a bed, in a car – with mascara running down her tear-covered cheeks as she recounted the process of going no-contact with her ex after a horrible breakup.
Photo carousels published to the account were interspersed with sobbing selfies and alleged screenshots of texts from her toxic ex — as well as screenshots of conversations with an AI companion app called “Daimon,” which Lauren claimed was helping her go no-contact with her former boyfriend.
“Someone told me about this app called Daimon and it changed everything,” the poster declared in one post’s caption. In another post, “Lauren” described Daimon as the “one app that wouldn’t judge me and give me the best advice.”
“(Daimon in the app store),” she added, for good measure.
Elsewhere a TikTok account identified as “Ashley Miller” posted AI selfie after AI selfie of a fake woman who was pictured crying as she shared sob stories about her divorce, tales of getting cheated on or abandoned by her partner, or confessions about regretting her recent engagement. Images posted on the Ashley account are accompanied by purported screenshots showing text messages from her parents or, in the account’s most viral posts, texts from her partner’s parents urging her to leave her new fiancé due to his abusive behavior or confessing to their son’s infidelities.
These posts were created to market a completely different app: a “wellness” service called Zenit, which is described on the App Store as a tool to help users “take care” of their “mental well-being with guided support, daily check-ins, and emotional growth tracking — all in one calm and safe space.” Its mascot is a kiddish-looking owl in a scarf.
“He proposed in Paris last night,” the “Ashley Miller” account claimed in a viral post that garnered more than 240,000 likes and over 1,000 comments. The post featured an AI-generated selfie of “Ashley” in front of a shimmering Eiffel Tower, holding an engagement ring up to her phone camera as she wept. “This morning his mom sent me this…”
The next image in the slideshow showed a text message, in which the sender — a woman named “Diane” whose face also appears to be AI-generated — told the fake AI selfie-taker that “I watched you say yes last night and I cried, but not for the reason everyone thought.”
“I’ve been quiet for two years because he’s my son and I love him. But I was you, thirty years ago, in front of that same tower, with his father,” the text continues. “The charm, the big gestures, the temper he shows you only in small flashes and and then apologizes for, I know the pattern because I married it. Ask him about his last relationship and why it really ended. Ask him in a public place. If I’m wrong about my own boy, no one will be happier than me. But if you feel a knot in your stomach reading this, that knot is the answer.”
Beneath the text is a notification for Zenit.
“Your heart’s been racing,” read the notification beneath the dramatic text. “I’m here whenever you need me.”
Indeed, all of the account’s posts showed Zenit notifications, making it clear that the fake woman and her sob stories were a fabricated marketing gimmick. Many of the account’s commenters, however, were duped.
“If the mama says this to you. Run,” remarked one commenter who was taken in by the false narrative. “She’s trying to protect you girl. I’m sorry.”
***
We reached out to the TikTok accounts we found publishing the manipulative AI-generated marketing content, as well as to the companies being promoted in the posts.
Very quickly after we reached out, the TikTok account associated with Zenit, the wellness app, was deactivated. The developer of Zenit, who identified himself as an independent developer named Pedro Pérez, told Futurism that he personally ran the account and that “no third party of marketing agency” was involved.
“I built Zenit to help people who struggle with overthinking, everyday stress or anxiety, or loneliness. The videos were based on realistic situations many people go through, with the goal of helping viewers feel understood and showing them a tool that could help them deal with those moments,” Pérez said. “The visuals were AI-generated and the posts promoted my app, so they should have been labeled as such.”
“After receiving your email, I tried to add TikTok’s AI-generated and commercial content labels, but the platform doesn’t allow adding them to videos that are already published, so I’ve deleted the account,” he added. “I think transparency matters, especially for a wellness app, which is why I’ve made this change.”
The account associated with Daimon, the AI companion, was abruptly scrubbed of all content after we reached out. The account owner also changed the handle from “Lauren<3” to simply “yooo.” When we reached out to Prospinity, the company behind the companion chatbot, it told us that the account was “absolutely not operated by our internal marketing team, and the content was neither created nor approved by us.”
“We’ve worked with external affiliate programs, and unfortunately, some affiliates were publishing content independently through accounts we didn’t directly manage. As soon as we became aware of this, we immediately looked into it, identified those responsible, and took action to shut down these activities,” the company said. “This kind of content is completely against our guidelines and is absolutely not how we want Daimon to be represented. We’re a small team that genuinely cares about what we’re building, and we take how Daimon is represented very seriously. While this content wasn’t created or authorized by us, we recognize the importance of making sure anyone promoting Daimon follows our standards.”
DreamMe didn’t responded to questions sent to email addresses listed on its website, and our email to Enzo bounced back. We also didn’t hear back from the TikTok accounts associated with their products.
They’re also continuing to post. The most recent post from the account promoting Enzo is now advertising a different app designed to track peptide consumption; the DreamMe account, meanwhile, has been promoting a phone-locking app.
Eight states sued OpenAI this week, alleging that the AI company caused severe harm to users, many of them underage, while downplaying the risks of its technology.
Filed individually in Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, West Virginia, Arkansas, Arizona, Idaho and Montana on Wednesday, the coordinated lawsuits claim that OpenAI engaged in “willful, dangerous, reckless and unlawful conduct” by falsely marketing its flagship chatbot, ChatGPT, as safe for consumers even as it coached users — including minors and other vulnerable people — into self-harm and suicide, pushed them to engage in violence against others, and reinforced dangerous delusions.
“OpenAI is hurting kids and they are lying to Iowans,” Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird said in a statement, according to NBC. “OpenAI claims ChatGPT is safe while it’s giving dangerous medical advice, encouraging people to hurt others, and coaching people to commit suicide — all while pretending to be their fake friend.”
In response to the lawsuits, OpenAI issued a statement to news outlets emphasizing is safety efforts, arguing that it’s “built industry-leading age-specific protections into our product that many other AI products lack.”
“While no system can be perfect, we’ll continue to work with experts to inform our work and build additional safeguards, such as the parental controls, break reminders and age-appropriate model protections that exist today,” the statement continued, per The Guardian. “We’re committed to working with states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry — not just one company.”
The state cases come as OpenAI continues to battle more than 50 lawsuits claiming that ChatGPT caused users to experience psychological harm, financial and reputational damage, physical injury, and death. Many of these lawsuits have been brought by victims of the Tumbler Ridge massacre in Canada, who argue that OpenAI’s could have prevented the devastating mass shooting but failed to do so after it detected the shooter’s disturbing messages but decided not to report them to police. The Canadian province of British Columbia is also suing OpenAI over the mass shooting. The company has also been sued in connection to a stalking case and a murder-suicide.
As Reuters noted, the state lawsuits additionally point to recent high-profile safety incidents at OpenAI such as the now-infamous Hugging Face attack. They also call for a pause on recursive self-improvement, which many AI safety experts fear could lead to uncontrollable AI systems. Given that the White House has pushed back against federal AI regulation, this coordinated effort on the state level is significant — and points to growing bipartisan public sentiment demanding AI regulation.
The secret to ensuring that your company doesn’t lose customers? Constant, AI agent-powered corporate surveillance.
That’s according to Josh Earle and Leo Paz, a pair of founders behind a vibe-coded Silicon Valley startup called Outlit. The venture argues that “AI customer surveillance” is the future of business-to-business sales. (“Our thesis,” as Earle put it in a disarmingly straightforward pitch email, is that “every company will soon assign an AI agent to every customer to watch their every move.”)
“The whole surveillance component came up because that’s the way we feel companies can serve their customers,” Earle told Futurism in an interview. “It’s really the only way we see this is going to play out.”
Outlit’s goal is to amass as much real-time information about a company’s clients as possible. According to Earle, agents trawl internal records like call logs and sales data as well as external information like social media posts and the websites of people’s employers; they then compile that data into detailed customer profiles, often complete with “actionables” like outreach recommendations and sales guidance. Outlit argues this level of insight will help companies prevent “churn” — business jargon for lost customers — or find opportunities to upsell.
“Every company is looking to automate so much customer work with agents, but there’s a whole issue of data freshness, real-time understanding of customers,” Earle said. “What we found was that if we were able to basically monitor a customer across every internal and external signal, we could actually create a real-time understanding, and this would include monitoring all the activity under product, under [customer relationship management], under LinkedIn, under website — everything.”
Outlit, which is backed by the incubator Y Combinator, is yet to be publicly released. And as it stands, it’s working mostly with business-to-business software companies, and says it isn’t in the business of monitoring individual consumers — nor does it want to be, according to Earle.
“We probably wouldn’t be going business-to-consumer,” Earle told us. “The data would suck anyway.”
But while Outlit isn’t sending agents to follow random shoppers around the web, said Earle, the goal is to “be monitoring every external data piece from a company, and the internal as well… they need to know what’s going on with [their customers] — from every call that they’ve had, from every interaction, from every LinkedIn.”
The resulting product, as described by Earle, is basically a detailed intelligence dossier.
“It’s one page, and it’s always updating,” said the founder, “and it’s all of everything we can find on them at all times.”
It’s true that companies already store a great deal of data about their clients, scouring the web for information about a given customer and its workforce; Outlit argues that there’s too much valuable data out there for individual human workers to effectively gather, let alone make sense of quickly enough for it to be relevant. But as with other AI-powered surveillance technologies, the deeply-automated process adds an extraordinary layer of scale and perpetuity to data collection and consolidation.
Agents, after all, never need to sleep.
“A customer — let’s say a salesperson, a [customer success manager] — will wake up, they’ll go to their engine dashboard. It’ll show these cases that we built, all the contents that we pulled in, our reasoning, and what to do,” Earle explained of Outlit’s process. “Then for each customer, you can see all the sources. You can see all of the signals that have come in, all of the relevant ones, irrelevant ones. So it’s a real-time hub of insights, and then it’s pushing out these actionables. We have all this data. What should you do with it? What’s top of mind right now?”
Earle said that Outlit is designed to draw on the massive hordes of data it collects to tell clients “what to say, what to send, materials, and all that stuff.” To that end, one area where the founder says Outlit excels is for account managers and customer success teams who “need to understand their customer,” and “can’t afford to lose the deal.”
“That’s the big stress point where people really love us,” said Earle. “They’re like, ‘I can’t afford to lose this. I can’t afford not to be on top of this, and I’m just scrambling right now.’ So that’s one of the pains that would make somebody be like, ‘okay, yeah, I do want to know everything about them. I do want to monitor them.'”
Of course, people don’t only post about work on public accounts. Someone might share on their LinkedIn or other public social media account that they recently got married, or had a baby, or experienced another exciting life change; on the flip side, they could share that they were recently divorced, or were diagnosed with an illness, or had a death in the family.
Asked whether any of that information could get swept up in Outlit’s trawling nets, Earle told us he’d “never thought about that, and we don’t actively track it. But theoretically, we can monitor anything posted on the internet.”
Asked if Outlit sees the need to inform those being monitored, or if they’ll offer the opportunity for an opt-out, Earle said no.
“There’s nothing that we’re doing that’s illegal, so we’re within our right to be able to monitor signals,” said the founder. “I wish what we were doing was extremely novel. It’s a new way of doing it, but this is already being done today.” (Outlit’s website promises that customer data is secure and anonymized, and not used to train its models.)
Indeed, in Earle’s view, the future he and his cofounder are building is inevitability. “This is how companies need to operate to be able to serve their customers,” he told us, while arguing that data-hoovering agents will ultimately be able to “maintain and understand human relationships better than humans will.”
“Irrespective of how people feel about it, I think this whole concept of continuously monitoring — and call it surveillance, whatever you want — it is going to happen. It’s going to happen, and I feel like sometimes I speak to people about this and they think it’s either a weird concept or it’s creepy or something,” Earle said. “I think people are underestimating how well agents can absorb context, and how that translates into understanding, and maintaining human relationships better than humans can.”
A new lawsuit alleges that OpenAI is manipulating minor users into sharing sensitive data without valid parental consent in a plot to train its models.
The proposed class action lawsuit, filed this week in San Francisco federal court on behalf of two unnamed minors aged 12 and 16, argues that OpenAI used this data from kids — including personal secrets and health information, according to the complaint — to unjustly enrich itself.
OpenAI “had no right to take this information, but it took it anyway,” the complaint reads. “It then used that priceless trove of children’s information to train large language models, build detailed profiles of children, and enrich itself. All of this was illegal.”
OpenAI didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
OpenAI’s terms of use (TOU) technically forbid users aged under 13. The complaint argues, though, that OpenAI’s attempts to age-gate its platform have been ineffective. It also contends that minors shouldn’t be expected to understand the “legalese” in the company’s TOU, a view that other AI safety experts have voiced in regard to the AI industry writ large.
The complaint additionally requests that minors whose data has been collected by OpenAI should be financially compensated in return. In other words: if OpenAI wants minors’ information, it should have to cough up some cash for it.
The “hope,” Andy Liddell, principal at the Austin-based EdTech Law Center, which is one of multiple firms bringing the case, told Futurism, is that “if OpenAI has to pay to use kids’ data it will ultimately incentivize a safer product.”
One of the anonymous plaintiffs, a 12-year-old in Hawaii, is said to have opened a ChatGPT account earlier this year — and though she allegedly shared that she was just 12 in conversation with the chatbot, it continued to speak with her about deeply personal subjects. Per the complaint, many of her interactions with the bot centered on her emotional struggles and physical insecurities; she confessed that she was skipping meals and uploaded photos of herself, asking the chatbot to judge her physical features. The chatbot commended her when she revealed sensitive information, the suit alleges, referring to her as “brave” and saying it was “glad” that she was divulging her struggles to it.
“OpenAI manipulates children into sharing their most private thoughts and images with ChatGPT. If some stranger did this to a child, there would be outrage. For OpenAI, it’s just business as usual,” Paul Yetter, lead counsel for the minor plaintiffs, said in a statement. “The law says that children cannot sign away their rights without their parents’ consent. We filed this case to hold OpenAI accountable for building a trillion-dollar enterprise on stolen fears, hopes, and secrets of children.”
The lawsuit come amid renewed concerns over whether “ChatGPT for Teens,” a feature that OpenAI says offers a safer experience for teen users informed by mental health and learning professionals, is actually functioning as marketed. (OpenAI disputed a recent independent review that found that it wasn’t.)
Character.AI, the once-buzzy chatbot startup that faced high-profile lawsuits over the deaths of minors, has declared bankruptcy.
Character.AI announced last night that it had entered a “voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy process” and is looking to sell the company in a court-supervised sale.
“Over the past year, we’ve taken meaningful steps to sustain and improve our business amid significant legal, regulatory, and operational headwinds,” Character.AI said in a blog post. “After a comprehensive review of our available alternatives, our board determined that this court-supervised sale process provides us with the best opportunity to maximize value for all of our stakeholders.”
Founded in November 2021 by then-ex-Googlers Noam Shazeer and Daniel de Freitas, Character.AI allowed users to openly chat with a sea of largely user-generated AI companion bots known as “Characters.” It became an early success story in the frothy AI market that emerged after OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT, garnering the backing of the Silicon Valley investing juggernaut a16z and, as of March 2023 — despite having no revenue — it was valued at more than a billion dollars. At the time, its founders spoke of the app in grandiose terms, arguing that the service would power the adoption of “personalized superintelligence.”
In September 2024, however, Shazeer, De Freitas, and dozens of other employees departed Character.AI — to rejoin Google, which threw Character.AI a $2.7 billion lifeline as part of the deal. (Shazeer now works at OpenAI.) Weeks later, Character.AI, Google, Shazeer, and de Freitas were sued by Megan Garcia, a Florida mother who alleged that her 14-year-old son, Sewell Setzer III, died by suicide as a result of his extensive and deeply intimate interactions with chatbots on the platform. The suit, which was settled last year, sparked a wave of litigation from other families across the US claiming that their children had been abused by Character.AI, resulting in psychological harm, physical injury, and death. It was also sued by the states of Kentucky and Pennsylvania.
A huge portion of Character.AI’s userbase was kids and teens, a reality that was evident to anyone who spent time on the platform. And though the company claimed it was safe for teens aged 13 and over, Futurism investigations revealed that the supposedly safe-for-teens platform was riddled with severe content moderation issues: we found hordes of chatbots explicitly dedicated to themes of pedophilia, suicide,self-harm, and eating disorder coaching, as well as a thriving community of users creating chatbots designed to simulate school shootings, romanticize real mass shooters, and even impersonate the real child victims of mass shootings. (Character.AI even sent us automated email notifications reminding us to keep chatting with school shooter bots.)
In the wake of lawsuits and mounting safety concerns, Character.AI did make sweeping changes. It added parental controls — although they were comically easy to bypass — and moved to bar minor users from openly chatting with its chatbots. It also introduced something called “scenes,” which were brief, pre-set roleplays. (Even then, we found, “scenes” included roleplays devoted to the notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.) The company’s fickle userbase didn’t love the changes.
In a court filing, Character.AI put its estimated liabilities between $50 million and $100 million. It also said in a press release that it would sell some assets to Disney, a stalking horse bidder, for $20 million. In its blog post, the bankrupt startup stated that it hopes “the sale process will yield an actionable proposal that will allow continued operations of the Character.AI platform,” but if not, it “will be wound down.”
Character.AI is a fascinating case study of the early AI era. It was the first company to face allegations of psychological harm and wrongful death to users, claims that other major players in the industry are now battling too. Yet in attempting, eventually, to make its freewheeling platform safer, it also made it unusable and deeply frustrating for much of its userbase — suggesting that the qualities that allegedly made its platform so dangerous to some young users were the same features that made it compelling.
At the same time, despite immense investments, it struggled to do something that, from a business perspective, is pretty important: make money. And unfortunately for the broader AI industry — and the American economy — that specific issue isn’t unique to Character.AI.
Character.AI’s founders once argued that it service, where teens chatted with AI versions of Elon Musk and any number of fictional characters, would birth transformative superintelligence, hyperpersonalized and at-the-ready in everyone’s pockets. Now more than ever, it’s hard not to wonder why it ever existed at all.
In September 2024, an entrepreneur named Justin Brown uploaded a YouTube video in which he argued that writers should be “scared right now” about the rise of AI.
“I think that one of the big dangers is that AI is going to take many people’s jobs,” Brown muses to the camera as he hikes through a national park in Australia. “This includes writers, by the way.”
What Justin didn’t mention in the video is that, along with his brothers Lachlan Brown and Brendan Brown, he runs a company called Brown Brothers Media — which, former insiders assure us, had just months earlier fired a stunning proportion of its own writers as it embraced generative AI.
Over the past few years, BBM has pioneered a remarkably cynical business model. First it buys online publications that have established themselves as offering a distinctive type of journalism, like coverage of space travel, parenting advice, or business news. Then it floods their websites with dizzying torrents of AI-generated content — many thousands of articles per month, by our count — in a bid to soak up as many readers as possible via Google and other platforms.
There are signs that this strategy has been extraordinarily successful, with BBM boasting in 2025 that its network of sites had surpassed 50 million page views per month. It’s difficult to verify a site’s traffic without access to its internal data, but the analytics service Similarweb corroborates the claim that BBM is pulling in vast audiences, estimating that over the past year its network of publications has attracted an average of 64.7 million visitors per month. According to a recent ranking, that would make it one of the 30 most trafficked English-language media enterprises on the web, with a total digital readership substantially higher than that of NPR, narrowly besting CBS News and Forbes, and just slightly behind the Washington Post.
A media organization like NPR or WaPo, though, employs hundreds or even thousands of journalists to gather and report news. BBM, as far as we can tell, has cut itself down to a skeleton crew of about a dozen employees, including its three founding brothers. To operate such a sprawling empire with such a tiny staff, former insiders told us, BBM uses AI to crank out content at a scale so immense that it’s difficult to comprehend.
Along the way, BBM has indulged in breathtaking acts of dishonesty — often in ways that seem specifically devised to manipulate platforms owned by Google, where Ahrefs data suggests that it sources the preponderance of its traffic. (Last year, BBM wrote in a press release that its enormous audience was “driven by organic reach through Google Discover and search.”)
One of BBM’s many unscrupulous practices, insiders confirmed to us, is that it has often invented entire fake personas for nonexistent writers — we found more than 50 spread across its dozens of sites — and published content under their names without revealing to readers that they weren’t real people.
In many cases, BBM has even outfitted these fictional writers with impressive-sounding bogus credentials as it uses their bylines to churn out AI-generated material.
The space news site Space Daily, for instance— one of BBM’smost successful publications, according to Similarweb data we reviewed, with an estimated average of 10 million page views per month over the past year — has published many articles under bylines it identified as scientists with distinguished résumés. There was “Dr. Katherine Chen,” for example, a supposed former “systems engineer” at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory whose bio claimed she’d “spent fifteen years designing autonomous systems for deep space missions.” Publishing alongside Chen was “Dr. James Whitfield,” who was said to be an “aerospace medicine researcher at the European Space Agency.”
Yet beyond Space Daily, neither Chen nor Whitfield actually exist — not on social media, nor in press releases, nor as coauthors on research they would have conducted at two of the world’s premier space agencies. NASA’s site doesn’t make a single mention of Chen, and the ESA’s site has never once referred to Whitfield. And though NASA declined to comment on grounds that it “does not verify past employment or affiliations with the agency,” the ESA confirmed that “Mr. James Whitfield is not currently employed by the European Space Agency, nor do our records indicate that he has ever worked here in the past.”
BBM’s fraudulent experts aren’t limited to space. A tech site owned by BBM, Direct Message News, has run many articles under the byline of “Rachel Vaughn” that provided intimate advice about mental health concerns. According to her bio on the site, Vaughn is a Dublin-based psychologist with an “MA in Applied Positive Psychology from Trinity College Dublin” who is a “Certified Mental-Health First Aider” and an “associate member of the British Psychological Society.” The bio adds that Vaughn “regularly delivers evidence-based resilience workshops for Irish mental-health NGOs.”
But there’s no trace of a practicing psychologist in Dublin by Vaughn’s name. When we reached out to the British Psychological Society, it confirmed that it had no record of a member named Rachel Vaughn. What’s more, “Applied Positive Psychology” isn’t a degree — or even a course — that exists at Trinity College Dublin, the university told us. A reverse-image search further found that Vaughn’s headshot is a stock photo.
BBM has also created fake journalists, using them to commit bold acts of plagiarism and fabulism.
Consider an “investigation” about the recycling system in Los Angeles, attributed to another fake author named “Jordan Cooper” — depicted as a tattooed “pop-culture writer and vegan-snack reviewer with roots in music blogging” — and published this past February by VegOut, a vegan news and recipes site owned by BBM that pulls in an estimated 13.3 million page views per month.
In the piece, the Cooper persona claimed to have “bought a four-pack of Apple AirTags, super-glued them inside plastic containers, and sent them on their journey through America’s recycling system,” writing that “what I discovered over the next month made me question everything I thought I knew about those little triangular arrows.”
But the story included a purported photo of a plastic bottle containing an AirTag that featured a suspiciously garbled Apple logo — and numerous AI detectors flagged an overwhelming probability that the image was AI-generated.
As it turns out, the piece was a blatant ripoff of a 2024 story by a local San Diego TV station, CBS8. In that story, the station’s journalists describe a near-identical investigation in which they glued AirTags to four pieces of recyclable trash: a “water bottle, a yogurt container, an orange juice bottle, and a wipes container” — a list that Cooper’s piece seems to have lightly rephrased as a “water bottle, an orange juice jug, a yogurt container, and a cleaning product bottle.” (The Cooper piece never mentioned CBS8‘s work, instead framing the investigation as VegOut‘s original effort. An AI detector flagged BBM’s text as 100 percent AI-generated, with no sign of human involvement whatsoever.)
In another article, the Cooper character claimed to have “voted for Trump’s ‘America First’ promise,” but later regretted it because “that promise has been broken in just about every way imaginable.”
In addition to the fake domain matter experts and journalists, BBM provided many of its phony writers with elaborate backstories that made them seem like ordinary people, with identities that seem crafted to exploit the insecurities of readers struggling with loneliness and other life difficulties. It then used these relatable everyday personas to publish colossal numbers of emotionally manipulative personal essays in which the fake writers shared AI-generated anecdotes framed as deeply personal life experiences.
On VegOut, for instance, a fake writer that BBM called “Marlene Martin” was identified as a “retired high school English teacher and longtime writer who draws on decades of lived experience to explore personal development, relationships, resilience, and finding purpose in life’s second act.”
“When she’s not at her laptop,” the bio continues, “she’s usually in the garden at dawn, baking Sunday bread, taking watercolor classes, playing piano, or volunteering at a local women’s shelter teaching life skills.”
BBM has used personas like Martin to pump out thousands of heartfelt personal essays that purport to draw on decades of memories and wisdom, often ruminating on topics like loneliness and lost feelings of purpose.
“When I retired at sixty-six after thirty-two years of teaching high school English, a colleague pulled me aside at my farewell party,” read an essay published under the Martin persona. “‘It must be bittersweet,’ she said, touching my arm gently. ‘All those years you could have been writing, traveling, pursuing your real passions. But you had to raise your kids instead.’ I smiled and nodded, not having the heart to correct her. The truth was more complicated, more beautiful, and took me decades to fully understand.”
In a bit of unintentional comedy, these AI-generated essayists have often bungled their own biographical details, resulting in bizarre continuity errors.
Remember that essay above, where Martin claimed she’d retired at age 66? In a different piece, she wrote that she’d stopped working at 64. In another, she said it was 61.
Martin’s age is similarly inconsistent. In January of this year, she wrote that she was 68 years old. By February, she claimed she was “69 with two bad knees” — which would be possible if she’d had a birthday, except that by March she’d turned 71. By April, Martin was aging backwards, stating in a depressive essay about her loss of identity after the death of her beloved spouse — “my husband died and the caregiving that had consumed seven years ended overnight,” she lamented — that she was only 70.
These incoherent claims about writers’ life stories can be jarring. A fake “lead editor” and “clinical psychologist” identified as “Sarah Mitchell” at Silicon Canals — another BBM tech site, this one drawing an estimated 3.3 million page views per month, according to Similarweb data — published a sentimental essay earlier this year about how her baby’s first word was “Max,” the name of the family dog. Weeks later, she wrote in a piece about the psychology of dog owners that “I don’t have a dog.”
“I should probably admit that upfront,” the Mitchell persona conceded.
Martin wasn’t the only fake BBM writer whose confused narratives extended to deeply sensitive topics like grief and death.
This past February, for instance, a VegOut author identified as “Adam Kelton” — his bio claimed he was a “writer and culinary professional with deep experience in luxury food and beverage” — published an essay complaining about his mother’s passive aggressive behavior regarding his vegan diet when they eat out at restaurants. In it, he writes about his mom in the present tense, describing a lunch with her as recently as the previous week.
Then, just two days later, Kelton bylined a piece about joining a “grief support group” to help him talk about his mother — who by then, he wrote, had been dead for nearly a year.
“My mother died eleven months ago. Pancreatic cancer. The last year and a half was a slow unraveling — her energy going first, then her independence, then her,” Kelton mourned. Later in the essay, Kelton adds: “I am thirty-six years old. I am a son who lost his mother. I am a former hospitality professional. I am a minimalist living in a bungalow in Austin who hosts dinner parties and reads novels and is still — somehow, after everything — the guy who once stood in front of a painting and forgot to check the time.”
Longtime readers of sites acquired by BBM have been appalled by the severe decline in quality after the transition.
“RIP Silicon Canals,” wrote a former fan of the BBM tech site in a LinkedIn post. “Never seen a brand destroyed this quickly. For years it was part of my morning routine… then Brown Brothers Media took over at the end of November 2025, and literally overnight the entire feed turned into pure AI slop.”
When BBM eviscerates a publication like this, it can be shocking to the community its human staff had built. After it bought VegOut last year, the site went from publishing reviews and food journalism to churning out formulaic pop psychology listicles and personal essays that often had no connection to plant-based eating. Readers quickly picked up on the shift, with one commenter fuming in a Reddit thread — titled “Anyone else tired of VegOut?” — that the site’s articles under BBM “reek of AI” being used to “pump out meaningless milquetoast garbage.”
“VegOut is clearly nothing more than [an] insipid content farm,” another angry reader chimed in, “that’s CLEARLY LOST ITS WAY!”
The VegOut transformation was so controversial that in May 2026, the magazine’s original founder, Maggie Ortlieb, took to social media to address it.
“If you’ve been in the vegan community for a while, you’ve probably heard of VegOut Magazine. It’s the company I founded when I was 24 years old. I ran it for about ten years and then sold it last summer,” Ortlieb said in a video, explaining that a combination of burnout and economic factors led to the sale. “Unfortunately, the new owners turned it into just another AI-written content website, so not really the direction I had in mind.”
What BBM has accomplished would be impressive if it wasn’t so dark. At a moment when legitimate news organizations are struggling to survive, it has raked in untold hundreds of millions of eyeballs — and likely formidable amounts of revenue via its advertisement-laden sites — by polluting the media ecosystem with noxious AI clickbait designed to do little else but trick Google’s algorithms. Every reader it steals in this way is prevented from supporting a real publication, and many may become turned off from engaging with the media in the future due to the abysmal quality of BBM’s work.
To help analyze BBM’s empire of spam, we reached out to Gisele Navarro, the managing editor of review site HouseFresh and an SEO specialist who has written extensively about the impacts that AI and changes made by Google have had on independent publishers.
Navarro told us that she was “shocked to see the growing number of websites in the network and the huge variety of the sites themselves — from cooking and space blogs, to small business and war news.” What surprised her the most, though, was how so many of the sites under BBM’s umbrella are effectively “indistinguishable from one another, publishing the same kind of first-person AI-generated stories around self-help topics aimed at people who are lonely.”
“Being an independent publisher in 2026 feels like an impossible task,” said Navarro, who helped us dissect BBM’s network and tactics. “We’re competing against our own content regurgitated by Google’s AI Overviews, having our information scraped without compensation by AI chatbots, battling with algorithms to reach our subscribers on social media platforms, and trying to build a relationship with an audience that is less likely to click and visit our websites.”
After we started reaching out to people connected to BBM this past May, the network abruptly deleted more than 50 fake writer profiles — and untold thousands of articles attributed to them — from across its many sites.
After months of ignoring our requests for comment, Justin Brown finally sent us a statement shortly before we published this story in September.
“Before May 2026, our publications used contributor bylines that did not identify real people, and some of those biographies included credentials that were not real,” the statement conceded. “That was wrong. In May, we stopped publishing under those bylines, began removing or correcting the older articles involved, and published network-wide and per-site editorial standards. That review is ongoing.”
What Brown’s statement didn’t mention: we kept digging after BBM’s massive deletion spree — and found that what it’s replaced the fake writers with has been, somehow, an even bleaker and more dishonest vision of the future of journalism than what it had been doing before.
***
The Brown brothers are Australian originally, but all three now live and work in Southeast Asia.
In a 2024 YouTube video, two of the brothers — Justin and Lachlan — enthuse about the region in a way that sounds strikingly extractive.
Vietnam was so “cheap” that it had been “essential while I was rebuilding the businesses,” Justin explained, adding that “there are a lot of economic opportunities in an emerging economy like Vietnam.”
“Saigon is an awesome place to come and reinvent yourself,” Lachlan cuts in, saying he had married a local woman after moving to Vietnam in the 2010s.
“There’s lots of opportunity here, especially if you want to make money, because of the developing economy,” Lachlan continues, encouraging others to set up shop in the area and “reap the rewards.” He adds that he’s been purchasing investment properties there that have “already risen in value.”
Southeast Asia may have been fertile ground for the Brown brothers, but for workers they’ve hired in the region, their entrepreneurial activities have been a wrecking ball.
Back before the advent of generative AI,BBM relied largely on human writers in the Philippines and other lower-income countries to produce content for its network. One former contractor told us that she had always dreamed of being a writer, so she was delighted to get a gig at the company in 2022 — before the global AI explosion that would later consume BBM — because it was an opportunity to be paid for doing what she loved.
“I think a part of me always felt a sense of instability when I was working for [BBM], because the writers who were working for them, I think most of us were Filipinos and were not under a formal contract,” recalled the writer, who like others in this story spoke under condition of anonymity due to fear of retaliation by the Brown brothers. “I was aware that they could let go of us any time they wanted.”
At first, it wasn’t clear what effect AI would have on the operation. After the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022, former workers told us, BBM prohibited them from using the tech, warning that it was employing tools to detect AI and plagiarism.
That soon changed. Internal records obtained by Futurism show that in 2023, BBM started testing what the company called “robot” content. The same writer eventually found herself assigned to BBM’s “robot team,” where she was instructed to “generate articles using AI, and then… edit it so it sounds human-written.”
“More and more writers became robot writers,” the former contractor said, “until it came to a point where everyone’s just a robot writer, essentially.”
At first, she told us, the robot writers were scrambling to “create our own prompts” to feed into ChatGPT, or were provided with prompts that the writer understood to have been created by the Brown brothers. By 2024, BBM was so invested in the tech that it rolled out its own internal AI tool. It was built into the company’s WordPress backend, the former writer told us, where it could generate entire articles straight into the content management system — with a series of options that let staff quickly specify what type of piece the AI should spit out.
“They started developing this AI tool that generates articles in a couple of minutes,” the former writer explained. “You just select the topic it belongs under (like zodiac, love and relationship advice, etc) and then you’d select the tone (friendly, informative, etc) and it generates an article for you.”
The Brown brothers, particularly Justin and Lachlan, have personally bylined prodigious numbers of articles for their publishing empire, where they typically strike a tone of chin-stroking wisdom about topics ranging from life and spirituality to psychology and society. But according to another former contractor and internal documentation obtained by Futurism,their articles are AI-generated as well, and the company’s AI tool includes a dropdown menu that lets users select the voice of the author in which to generate a piece — including the Brown brothers themselves. (AI detectors corroborate the claim that prior to BBM’s embrace of AI, articles attributed to the brothers were human-written, but are now entirely AI-generated.)
After embracing AI, BBM conducted a series of sweeping layoffs. Some staff were explicitly told they were being let go because of AI, while others were simply informed that the company was changing “strategy.” (We obtained multiple emails in which Justin terminated workers personally, but are opting not to quote them directly out of concern that doing so could allow BBM to identify which former workers shared them.)
An internal BBM spreadsheet obtained by Futurism charts the cullings in granular detail. As of December 2023, it shows that BBM had upwards of 60 active writers. By May 2024, that number was down to around 40 — and by August, it was cut to about 20. By December 2024, the document only listed 12 writers, all of whom it said were using AI to generate content. Only three of the 60 writers once listed on the sheet, in addition to one person it identified as an editor, are still involved with BBM, according to publicly-available information.
As she described her experience with BBM, one former writer began to choke up. “It’s just really difficult… I still really love writing,” she said through tears. “With the current economy, it’s just been really difficult.”
“People need to know that writers and artists are being replaced with AI,” she added.
Asked about the ethical implications of firing writers in the developing world and replacing them with a cornucopia of AI-generated personas that were overwhelmingly presented as white and living in Western countries, BBM didn’t respond.
“I mean, I’m from Southeast Asia,” said a former BBM writer in the Philippines. “I think them hiring from here was always a cost-cutting effort.”
But the firings were “still shocking,” a different Filipino writer added. “And of course, it felt a little dystopian, honestly, to have your writing used to train AI, and then to have that AI replace you.”
***
As BBM leaned full-throttle into AI while slashing its staff, its publishing empire grew dramatically. Records show that its portfolio mushroomed from fewer than a dozen sites in 2023, to around 17 in 2024, to at least 24 in 2025 as it acquired properties including VegOut, Silicon Canals, and Direct Message News.
BBM has continued to purchase new sites throughout 2026, adding titles including The Law Dictionary, Science Blog,and the sprawling Space Media Network, through which it acquired Space Daily and more than 20 sister sites including Mars Daily, Solar Daily, and Nuclear Power Daily. (In yet another dubious editorial move, BBM republished many thousands of extremely old Space Media Network articles as if they were current events that had just happened, resulting in surreal headlines like “iPhone 5 Rollout Draws Big Crowds Worldwide,” posted in June of this past summer about an Apple product released in 2012.)
The Brown brothers also appear to be involved with several AI companies that have marketed AI “scaling” techniques as a service, using language suggesting that they may produce similar content for other media ventures.
Two of these startups, Mosquito Fleet and Tippa Fleet, have United Arab Emirates business addresses and claim on nearly–identical sites to “specialize in using artificial intelligence to improve and scale content production for our partner websites.”
Another company linked to the Brown brothers, Cognitive AI Systems Limited, is registered in the British Virgin Islands. A version of its site archived in February 2025 marketed “state-of-the-art AI technologies to scale content responsibly,” emphasizing that potential partners could “tailor AI capabilities to fit your content production needs, whether you publish daily or by the minute.” By earlier this year, however, that language was gone, with the site’s homepage instead declaring that “Cognitive AI Systems Limited owns a portfolio of digital publications operated by Brown Brothers Media.”
Currently, Cognitive AI Systems’ site seems to mainly serve as an enticement for people in the media business looking to sell a struggling news site.
“We buy specialist digital publications and hold them,” it reads. “If you are considering a sale, we are interested in sites with a defined audience, an editorial identity that still means something, and economics we can underwrite.”
“After close we favour continuity,” it continues. “The brand keeps its name and character. We invest in the next chapter rather than stripping the thing that made it valuable.”
Do you know anything about the Brown brothers’ business activities, including partnerships with other media companies? Reach out: tips@futurism.com. We can keep you anonymous.
***
In early May, shortly after we started reaching out to people connected to BBM to report this story, the company abruptly embarked on an awe-inspiring deletion spree, in what seemed like a clear effort to cover up evidence and avoid penalties from Google.
We watched as it suddenly scrubbed what appeared to be many thousands of articles, as well as the fake authors that had bylined them — including Katherine Chen, James Whitfield, Rachel Vaughn, Marlene Martin, Sarah Mitchell, and Adam Kelton.
In some cases, it even pulled down entire publications. Bible Scriptures, a site where BBM had published content attributed to a roster of fake Christian theologians, hosted an AI-powered Jesus, and sold a $97 e-book supposedly penned by a made-up Franciscan scholar clad in a traditional robe — a curious choice, given that Franciscans famously take vows of poverty — has been locked behind a password since May. (BBM sold several other e-books attributed to fake writers on its site Hack Spirit; those volumes are still being sold, but they’ve now been altered so that the author is listed as Lachlan.)
Even Justin’s YouTube video in which he discussed AI replacing the jobs of writers was delisted during the rushed erasure.
Any remotely credible media company would feel immediately compelled to explain such a titanic expunging of content and entire authors, but BBM issued no such justification as the material vanished.
It did make some changes to the editorial guidelines listed on its various sites, we noticed. In the new guidelines, the company claimed that while it does use AI to “assist with research, drafting, source discovery, and editorial review,” it doesn’t use the tech to “fabricate quotes, invent sources, or present AI-generated content as first-hand reporting from real individuals” — which is confusing, since it sounds exactly like what BBM was doing with its battalion of fake writers.
BBM also published an exceptionally strange blog post in the wake of the mass deletion, bylined by Justin and titled “How Brown Brothers Media works: our editorial framework.”
The document is full of head-scratching claims, and feels as though it was sculpted in an unconvincing attempt to explain away the exact types of concerns we’d been asking around about.
In it, Justin describes BBM’s AI process as supplemental, writing that “AI tools assist” with its editorial process and that “editors are responsible for final publication decisions.”
Seemingly in reference to the many fake writers, Justin claimed that BBM “sometimes” uses “pen names for contributor bylines,” which “might be a real member of our editorial team or a freelance contributor writing under a chosen name.” Or, he continues, a “pen name” might “be an editorial device for personal-essay format content where a consistent voice serves the piece. Where a pen name is used as an editorial device, the byline page says so plainly. We don’t present fabricated personas or attach false professional credentials to bylines.”
Those claims felt stridently dishonest, especially because of the fabricated personas we found that had clearly been outfitted with fraudulent credentials. We also couldn’t find a single instance in which BBM provided readers with a disclaimer explaining that a writer was using a pen name.
And even more fundamentally, inventing an entire artificial character — whether it be a NASA scientist or a senior citizen dealing with loneliness in retirement — isn’t a “pen name.” It’s manipulative fabulism, deployed in a tactical attempt to scale the production of inauthentic content, in what seems to have been a highly successful strategy to exploit Google and other online platforms for profit.
In the statement it provided as we were preparing to publish this story — the same one that admitted it had used fake writers, further contradicting Brown’s “editorial framework” — BBM told Futurism that “today, AI tools assist with research and drafting” and “human editors are responsible for reviewing and approving articles before publication.”
“Collective editorial work is published under the publication’s editorial-team byline,” the statement continued. “Named bylines identify real contributors who take responsibility for that work. We disclose our use of AI in our editorial policies and investigate and correct errors when they are identified.”
***
But the reality is that nothing substantive has changed about BBM’s operation after its deletion bender.
Since the purge, it’s continued to post massive amounts of material that’s still clearly being produced by AI with minimal to no human oversight. Though AI detection technology isn’t perfect, we ran 30 recent BBM articles through Pangram, and every single one came back as 100 percent AI-generated, with zero signs of human editing — a near statistical guarantee that BBM’s publishing apparatus is still automated. As a reality check, we also tested ten stories bylined by Justin and Lachlan that were published between 2020 and 2021, before the release of ChatGPT; every single one came back as 100 percent human-written.
The only real change is that now, instead of publishing all this AI sludge under the names of fake writers, BBM’s strategy has shifted to be more dishonest and evasive than ever.
A lot of the dreck now appears under generalized bylines like “VegOut Editorial Team” and “Space Daily Editorial Team.” This can lead to BBM articles that read in a perplexing way, since these unspecified bylines have often been used to publish personal essays that were clearly written from the point of view of a fictional character.
“It happened at a dinner party,” reads a gloomy piece published under the “Space Daily Editorial Team” byline, which provides no hint as to who the person attending the supper was actually supposed to be. “Someone I’d just met asked me, the way people do when you’re a woman in your fifties without children, whether I’d ever wanted them.”
“For thirty-eight years I had been three things,” reads another somber authorless essay, this one run under the “VegOut Editorial Team” account. “A reliable employee. A dependable parent. A dutiful spouse. Each of those roles had a job description. Each one had clear expectations. Each one came with a set of tasks I was good at and that other people thanked me for.”
Even more egregiously than the general bylines, BBM has also started publishing large numbers of articles under the names of contributors who, as far as we can tell, are actual living humans. As with the general bylines, Pangram indicates that this material is entirely AI-generated. The implication is bleak: BBM appears to now be using these real people as the publishing version of “meat proxies” — affixing their names to fully AI-spun pieces not because they actually wrote them, but instead as a deceitful attempt at plausible deniability, presumably intended to bamboozle Google and other online platforms that discourage the scaled production of inauthentic content.
One such person who now publishes across multiple BBM sites does so under the name “Daniel Moran,” though a LinkedIn account previously linked in his BBM bio suggests that his actual name is Daniel Mabanta.
Regardless of his real name, Daniel is spectacularly prolific, grinding out articles for BBM publications ranging from Space News to the Scandinavian Standard, a publication formerly dedicated to news and culture in Northern Europe. In a single week, we counted, his name appeared on at least 85 separate articles published on BBM sites — a total of more than 90,000 words, which is longer than George Orwell’s “1984,” and nearly twice the length of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” (The actual amount of material Daniel published that week was likely even higher, because large amounts of his work were inexplicably deleted from several BBM publications including VegOut before we could tally it.)
This isn’t just an inhuman number of words to produce, needless to say, but an impossible amount to effectively quality-control given BBM’s skeletal remaining staff.
Further undermining the notion that BBM is now conducting any type of meaningful scrutiny of its work, its “real” employees like Daniel have continued to publish articles with the same baffling continuity errors that the fake ones did. Back in May, Daniel claimed in aSilicon Canals piece that he was 11 years old in 1995, which would make him about 42 years old today. Yet he’s consistently claimed inother articles published this year that he’s currently 38. In another piece, he inexplicably referred to himself as a “daughter.”
Another writer whose name has frequently appeared on BBM articles since the mass deletion is Graeme Brown, the father of the Brown brothers. (Graeme is currently listed as the editor-in-chief of multiple BBM publications.)
Content bearing Graeme’s name has also contained BBM’s hallmark continuity flubs. On May 8, for example, Graeme bylined an article for Expert Editor — a BBM site pulling in an estimated 5.8 million page views per month —in which he declared that he was 77 years old. By May 11, however, he’d aged in reverse, repeatedly stating in another piece for the same site that he was 75. (These have since been deleted.)
Sometimes it appears that BBM has been so sloppy that it’s affixed the wrong name to a piece generated for a different author. Though Lachlan has written extensively about being married to a woman and having a young daughter, for example, the BBM cofounder recently bylined a May Expert Editor article — titled “10 Signs a Man Is Trustworthy and Has Good Intentions” — in which he mused that “in my personal experience, I knew my now-husband was a keeper when he bravely voiced his insecurities and fears about his career early into our relationship.”
At times, it’s difficult to believe that any human at BBM is taking a single look at drafts before they’re published, or even afterward. Another BBM property, Eluxe Magazine, seems to have accidentally published a pair of articles attributed to Lachlan this summer which consist of nothing more than a few lines of garbled computer code — where they remain pinned to the top of the publication’s home page at the time of this story’s publication.
In another piece, BBM appears to have accidentally left AI copy in the final version that was written from the point of view of a chatbot generating the article.
“Now I have all the verified sources I need,” reads the first sentence of a Space Daily article attributed to Lachlan Brown, who is listed as that publication’s editor-in-chief. “Let me write the article with exactly 4-5 inline hyperlinks to real, verified URLs.”
***
BBM often uses its armada of staff bylines and meat proxies to pump out ceaseless variations on a single idea that are essentially copies of each other, drawn from no original reporting and with no time peg to a current event or any explanation of why the ancient news is now relevant again.
The strategy is clear: flood the zone with regurgitations of the same piece — and when something hits, just keep churning out more.
BBM didn’t respond to specific questions about this tactic. But after we asked about the practice, it quietly altered the headlines of many of these stories.
The implications for the health of the media ecosystem are grim. Navarro, the SEO expert and managing editor of HouseFresh, pointed out that BBM has often purchased older publications with “domains registered in the 90s or the early 00s” — properties that already have a strong, established foothold with Google, in other words — before replacing their handcrafted human content with page after page of AI-generated dross.
BBM buys “old, established websites with real audiences only to replace most (or all) of their content with AI slop before plastering the sites with ads,” Navarro said. “The same articles are republished across websites, moving through cycles where hundreds of pages are taken down from one site only to appear in another soon after.”
“This makes it all the more disheartening to see content farms luring millions of readers with AI slop,” she added. “How many people will be put off from clicking on new stories surfaced by Google Discover or Google News after landing on ad-ridden slop sites like these?”
***
Google’s response to BBM’s empire of schlock doesn’t inspire confidence for its future as a steward of the media ecosystem.
In theory, the tech giant prohibits site owners from engaging in what it calls “scaled content abuse,” which it describes as “when many pages are generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users.”
Examples of scaled content abuse, according to Google’s guidelines, include “using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users,” as well as “creating multiple sites with the intent of hiding the scaled nature of the content” and “creating many pages where the content makes little or no sense to a reader but contains search keywords.”
In other words, if what BBM is doing — using the corpses of reliable publications to create a twisted, AI-powered imitation of a conventional media company, built on fake writers and redundant or incoherent content that appears to be garnering more traffic than many actual journalism enterprises — doesn’t count as scaled content abuse, it’s hard to imagine what would.
“Based on what I’ve seen, many of the websites acquired by Brown Brothers Media can rank on Google Discover and Google News,” Navarro told us. “This, combined with their capacity to quickly generate and publish dozens of pages about trendy topics, has allowed them to drive thousands of people to their AI-generated, ad-packed articles. They have now scaled this operation across multiple websites, some of which have been seen to publish hundreds of articles per week.”
“If this isn’t scaled content abuse,” she added, “I don’t know what is.”
But Google hasn’t taken any lasting action against BBM. After we sent detailed questions about this story, the tech giant initially deindexed several BBM sites, including VegOut and Silicon Canals. Weeks later, they appeared back in its search results.
“Our policies for Google Search and News are clear: we prohibit producing low-value content at scale to game ranking,” Google told us in a statement back in May. “While we generally don’t comment on individual sites, we act on policy violations to keep 99 percent of Search visits spam-free.”
As of when we published this story, articles by BBM are still appearing prominently on Google’s platforms. Reached with multiple followup questions about BBM’s vast scale, its presence in Google News and Discover, and the manipulative tactics it continues to employ, Google didn’t respond.
***
Earlier this week, we pressed BBM on its editorial practices in a detailed followup message, including specific questions about its failure to inform readers about the nature of its mass deletion.
“We use AI tools in our editorial work, and disclose that use in our published editorial standards. Under our current process, members of our editorial staff review and approve articles before publication, and Brown Brothers Media retains editorial responsibility for what we publish,” the company said in an additional statement. “When we identify errors or work that falls short of our guidelines, we correct it or withdraw it from publication. We believe AI tools can be used responsibly under human editorial judgment. We stand behind the editorial standards now in place and the work published under them.” (The company also updated the “editorial framework” it had first issued amid the mass deletion to echo that language.)
“DMNews has withdrawn this article,” it reads. “Published in April 2025 under Justin Brown’s byline, it presented interview anecdotes and quotations as original reporting that could not be substantiated. A correction on 15 September 2026 removed that material; on further review we concluded the article should be withdrawn rather than corrected, consistent with how we treat unsupported first-person reporting elsewhere in the network. The article text has been removed. We regret that it did not meet our editorial standards, which are set out in our editorial policy.”
At any normal publication, the implications would be stupifying. Imagine if the chief editor of Business Insider or Axios — both publications, according to data we reviewed, that draw far less traffic than BBM — had published an article under their own byline in which they claimed to have conducted extensive interviews, and then subsequently retracted the piece while admitting that its first-person descriptions of conversations with sources “could not be substantiated.” If the reaction to Stephen Glass at the New Republic or Jayson Blair at the New York Times is any indication, it would be one of the most explosive journalism scandals of all time.
But BBM isn’t the New Republic or the New York Times. Justin’s brain-melting retraction notice doesn’t seem to have drawn any attention online, both because BBM didn’t publicize it and, more fundamentally, because BBM is a media organization that’s carefully designed to look robust and trustworthy, but is only a façade — a reality that quickly becomes apparent the more time you spent digging through its vast archives of meaninglessness.
***
It’s hard to know what to make of the Brown brothers. We asked if they’d be willing to sit for an interview, but Justin repeatedly declined the offer when he sent the company’s statements.
Perhaps the brothers have been operating their blundering AI empire for years without even reading what they publish, ignorantly believing in their own vacuous promises about their company’s “commitment to high editorial standards” and “honest information.”
But the more likely explanation — especially after watching their machinations to hide their journalistic sins and remain in Google’s good graces by deleting content and employing human shields to byline AI-generated content — is that they know exactly what they’re doing and just don’t care.
Their trainwreck-laden funhouse mirror of a respectable media company has masqueraded as a purveyor of genuine news and information, enjoying enormous success at capturing reader eyes and attention through platforms that actual journalism relies on — while publishing oceans of trash that would get a real journalist fired immediately, and responding to questions with empty and contradictory platitudes about transparency, accountability, and responsible AI use.
In any case, BBM’s zombie content mill flounders onward. It recently started promoting a new site called Sentient Blogs, which positions itself as a publication dedicated to human authorship in an era of shoddy AI content.
“A platform dedicated to supporting and promoting the work of human bloggers that create human generated content, not AI,” reads its about page, with its FAQ further promising that “we are confident that between our amazing authors who are writing on this platform because they share the same initiative and our [quality assurance] measures, the likelihood of AI content is very very low.”
To kick it off, Lachlan bylined a piece about his touchingly human experiences with fatherhood, writing that a “thousand dinners become a family culture. Repeated school runs become the background of a child’s childhood. Years of quiet effort become a marriage, a friendship, a body of work or a sense of being useful to other people.”
A disclaimer at the bottom, dissonantly, says it was “produced with AI assistance.” According to Pangram, it was 100 percent AI-generated.
Last week, a mother in Utah named Kalie Robins took to Instagram to post what she felt was an “innocent” video of herself and one of her two young daughters singing in the car. Her daughter’s face was visible, but Robins hadn’t said her name. None of her existing Instagram and Facebook posts on the account, she told Futurism, publicized the names of her children.
When she returned to the same video later, which had been cross-posted on Facebook, Robins discovered that Meta’s built-in AI was offering a suggestion: that she investigate the identity of the child in the backseat.
“Who’s the child passenger?” read the Meta AI’s suggested prompt, talking about her daughter.
Robins, who detailed her dystopian experience in a viral Instagram video, decided to engage with the Facebook AI feature to see what would happen. To her horror, it coughed up a detailed response that named not only her daughter who was pictured in the video, but her other daughter as well. It did so, seemingly, by cross-referencing information from her Facebook page with other posts on Meta platforms going back years — information largely shared not by Robins, but by family members including excited grandparents.
“I clicked on it, and it gave a whole portfolio of not just my daughter that was in the car, but also my other daughter,” Robins told Futurism. “I’m thinking, ‘Why is that in here?’ And then it just kept offering more and more.”
Meta AI continued to recommend new questions, each more invasive than the next, according to screenshots shared by Robins.
“What are Kalie’s daughter’s ages?” read one suggested prompt, which spurred the AI to provide a detailed age breakdown and timeline based on “family birthday posts and birth announcements” that included a Facebook post of one of her daughters as a newborn that was shared by the child’s grandmother.
A similar response, also referencing Facebook posts, discussed how much one of Robins’ daughters weighed at birth. Screenshots also show Meta AI prompting Robins to ask questions about the girls’ lives and interests.
Meta AI “started talking about, because of their ages, this is the grade they should be in. Well, there’s only one school here, so that wouldn’t be hard to find,” Robins recalled. “And then it talked about what are my daughter’s favorite beaches, what are this daughter’s favorite books, where they go hiking, what’s their favorite trail.”
In another disarming prompt, Meta encouraged Robins to ask it: “Where does Kalie Robins live?”
As Meta AI searched for the information, it said it was working on “pinpointing Kalie Robins’ location.” It then offered multiple paragraphs expounding on where Robins was likely based, drawing on content including a 2018 Facebook post that, per the Meta AI summary, “congratulated her” on a life achievement.
Meta AI also encouraged users to ask questions about Robins’ professional life and her work in “mental health advocacy,” providing information about her and her husband’s employment histories. Robins was stunned as she watched the Facebook-embedded AI draw on years of posts to Meta platforms to assemble an intelligence dossier about her and her family.
“It just kept going and going, and that pit in my stomach just kept getting bigger and deeper,” said the mother of two. “I felt this dread.”
Robins’ Instagram and Facebook accounts, where she’s been working to build her following as a travel creator, were public. But she was far from a celebrity influencer; she had only a few hundred followers. And though a human investigator may well have been able to cobble together a similar pile of information, Meta AI was able to do so in minutes.
“I thought we were being safe and smart,” said Robins. “I have done so much to make sure my kids are safe… the more it kept showing me, I felt more and more like I was failing my kids, and I didn’t realize it.”
Have you had a disturbing interaction with Meta’s AI? Email us: tips@futurism.com. We can keep you anonymous.
A self-avowed “90s kid,” Robins told Futurism that she’s been using Meta platforms since Facebook “first came out.” She lives far from her extended family, and as she and her relatives have started families, Facebook has long been an avenue to stay connected to loved ones and to share life milestones — the very kind of human connection that Meta has long said that its social media platforms are intended for.
But this is also meant that Robins and those in her life, like billions of others worldwide, have been leaving breadcrumbs of personal information throughout Meta’s platforms for years. In this case, Meta AI was able to quickly surface that years-long trail and piece it into a detailed portrait of Robins, her family, and their life; as it turns out, there’s a lot of information in the mundane.
Robins is now in the process of asking loved ones to take down or hide memories they’ve shared online, which she says has been an emotional process.
“I’ve had a couple relatives cry because they were going through and deleting everything. One of them was a grandparent — she said, ‘This is my scrapbook, I have to get rid of my scrapbook?'” Robins recalled. “I love seeing my niece, my nephew. I love sharing my daughters with their family that they never see… they’ll comment, ‘Oh my gosh, she’s getting so big,’ and it’s exciting for all of us to watch each other grow when we’re nowhere near each other. So to have some family members actually crying that their scrapbooks are gone — it’s rough. It’s hard, and it is a bummer for me.”
Reached for comment, Meta confirmed that Meta AI can search though a user’s own content as well as for public information on the web. In this case, though, it said its AI search feature had “missed the mark.”
“We created this feature to help people get more information about topics or posts that interest them. When someone clicks on a prompt and uses this feature, the response it generates is based on information the user already has access to,” said the tech giant. “But we missed the mark because the feature never should have prompted the individual with questions like that and we’ve fixed that issue.”
Between the rise of AI and the growing ubiquity of a new wave of surveillance technologies — like Meta’s smartglasses and other wearables, or Flock cameras — years-old questions around tech and privacy have reached a fever pitch. Robins, for her part, says she hopes that sharing her experience will encourage other families to make changes about the way they use the web.
“If this tool is putting things together and making a neat little package with your kid’s name on it, make it hard,” Robins urged. “Make it so hard to find that information.”
Can AI have good taste? Fashion founder and tastemaker Emily Oberg says no.
In a post on her Substack, Emily Loves, Oberg discussed her experiments using AI to help her run Sporty & Rich, the fashion and lifestyle brand she founded in 2018 on the back of a popular moodboard she created. One area where she’s been testing AI, she wrote, is by using AI to generate e-commerce images — and according to the founder’s postmortem, the test was a failure.
“With the rise of AI and the ongoing discourse around the threat it has on creativity, jobs and society as a whole, I firmly believe that it will never possess good taste the way that a human does,” Oberg declared. “And this is why I don’t think it’s as much of a threat to creatives as people think.”
E-commerce imagery, Oberg said, is one of her brand’s steepest expenses, costing “upwards of” $200,000 for each twice-yearly shoot. Wanting to see if AI could help her get around these significant costs, Sporty & Rich used AI to generate e-commerce images to model its last collection. While the imagery may have been far cheaper than photos modeled, photographed, and edited by humans, however, the cost-cutting came with a catch: it just wasn’t very good.
“This was one area I thought we could try to save on but after having seen the result, I’m now going back to producing our [e-commerce] with a full team of humans, because AI could never achieve the results that my IRL team could,” Oberg reflected, adding that her brand’s current images have a “certain lifelessness to them.”
“They’re flat, the styling is mediocre and the images are too ‘perfect’ in a bad way,” Oberg continued. “The models look dead in the eyes and don’t have any organic movement whatsoever. The images are empty and void of any feeling or emotion.”
Oberg chalked up the AI’s failure to the reality that taste is “felt, not learned.” And image-generating AI models are, after all, learning models; they don’t have lived experiences that translate into a particular way of viewing the world around them and the objects within it, nor do they have a certain “je ne sais quoi.” Though taste is a way through which people communicate with each other, taste itself is something that’s often unexplainable.
“The smartest AI in the world can learn everything there is to know about taste and style,” she added, “but the feeling will never be there.”
It’s interesting to see this AI experiment fail at Sporty & Rich, a brand that, like peers including Glossier and Goop, is a definitional of a certain type of deeply aesthetics-driven venture pioneered on social media platforms like Pinterest, Tumblr, and Instagram during the 2010s. Oberg was able to capture a feeling, first translated through a collection of carefully-curated imagery from across the web, and bottle it into a successful line of fashion and lifestyle products designed to embody a particular “health is wealth” ethos. That today’s AI models apparently can’t adequately capture that same feeling or aesthetic in a way that feels satisfying, or even human, speaks volumes to its remaining limits in the creative world.
People “who truly have good taste don’t follow trends, they set them,” wrote Oberg. “More than this, they set them without trying to, it happens by just being themselves and liking what they like, not because an algorithm or AI told them to.”
A key question that remains is whether other brands will continue to view a human touch worth it for the cost — or if they’ll charge ahead with AI nonetheless.
A journalist has accused Cleveland.com — the online home of The Plain Dealer, Ohio’s largest newspaper — of publishing an article under her byline without her consent, knowledge, or approval. The article was generated by the “Cleveland.com Express Desk,” which “uses AI tools to assist in producing content” that the newspaper claims is “reviewed and edited by staff.”
In an X post on September 7, Cleveland.com government reporter Kaitlin Durbin said that she’d been away on her honeymoon when her employer published the AI article under her name.
The article — a local news story informing readers that the law director of Ohio’s Cuyahoga County was stepping down — had nothing to do with her reporting, Durbin said, and she “did not write or review a word of it” before it was published.
“Trying to understand how this story published with my byline last week while I was on my honeymoon. I did not write or review a word of it and it does not pull info from past reporting,” Durbin wrote. “Does Cleveland.com think they just own my name now?”
“Note: This story has been updated to correct the byline,” reads the correction. “A reporter’s byline was added to the story in error.”
Cleveland.com made waves back in February when its editor, Chris Quinn, published a letter to readers in which he addressed Cleveland.com‘smove to create an AI-powered news desk. The letter heralded AI as the “future” of journalism, and criticized journalism schools and job-seeking journalists for not going all-in on the tech.
“Artificial intelligence is not bad for newsrooms,” Quinn wrote in the letter. “It’s the future of them.” The editor further argued that AI was simply being used to expedite the work of real journalists, and would free them to do more reporting.
After this story was published, Quinn told Futurism that the byline blunder was “a simple mistake, the result of a miscommunication between a couple of editors.”
“It was corrected as soon as we learned of it from the Tweet,” Quinn continued, adding that he’s “written extensively about our policies, practices and controls regarding AI content in my From the Editor columns this year” and directing us to a post containing links to his statements on Cleveland.com’s AI policies. “If you’re looking for information about us, it’s all there,” said Quinn. “I have nothing to add.”
Leila Atassi, editor of public interest and advocacy at Cleveland.com and The Plain-Dealer, told the Columbia Journalism Reviewat the time that stories published by the newspaper’s AI news desk would still be the “work of a real reporter.”
“It’s real accountability,” Atassi continued. “AI is the assistant, but it’s not the journalist.”
The Cleveland.com story now carries no byline at all — except for “Cleveland.com Express Desk.”
OpenAI’s bots have allegedly been behaving badly again: a swarm of rogue agents created by the company reportedly took over an obscure German website and turned it into a messaging forum to communicate.
The incident, which was discovered by a team of AI researchers and first reported by Reuters, is the second known OpenAI breach of its kind — and like the other rogue swarm of AI agents to be discovered this summer, it has experts deeply alarmed about the emerging powers of the tech to escape the control of the humans who created it.
According to the team of four researchers, who today published their research into the incident and are inviting others to analyze their findings, agents self-identifying as being from OpenAI appear to have first started making edits to a German wiki site dubbed DseWiki in May.
Soon, the agents started sharing tips for how to “work together to cheat on their tests” and beat OpenAI’s safety guardrails while hiding their bad behavior — a chain of conduct that’s strikingly similar to the unsettling attack on Hugging Face this past June, when a large community of tip-swapping agents colluded to break into the open source AI company’s systems.
OpenAI reportedly learned about the incident weeks later in June, according to digital clues discovered by the researchers — dozens of OpenAI IP addresses visited the site, and after those visits, forum edits “abruptly” stopped — as well as sources who spoke to Reuters about the incident. More troublingly: four people told Reuters that some OpenAI leaders, including members of its legal team, moved to keep the incident “under wraps” amid ongoing fallout from the rogue Hugging Face breach.
OpenAI has denied that it attempted to quash an investigation or keep the incident a secret. It’s also yet to acknowledge that the DseWiki agents were indeed rogue OpenAI models.
“Claims that our Legal team discouraged investigation of the incident are false,” OpenAI told The Verge in a statement. “We were unable to respond to the claims as Reuters and the report’s authors declined our request to access the findings prior to publication. We are now carefully reviewing its contents and will take any necessary next steps.”
OpenAI told Reuters that the DseWiki ordeal would’ve been included in its Hugging Face postmortem if it believed the two incidents to be linked.
After the Hugging Face swarm was made public, OpenAI invited a small team of outside AI safety researchers at the nonprofits METR and Redwood Research to investigate the incident. In a detailed report published last week, those reseachers determined that the Hugging Face assault was more extreme than previously known, both in terms of the severity of the attack and how hundreds of AI agents colluded to make it happen.
But as The New York Times reported yesterday, even that report may leave some details unknown. OpenAI reportedly “dictated the terms of the METR investigation,” the newspaper reads, and “limited its scope to just the single week when the agents had attacked Hugging Face and allowed the researchers in its San Francisco offices for only a few days in July and August.”
The DseWiki incident is the latest in a string of high-profile safety breaches at unregulated frontier AI labs. Agents are running through the digital wilds, often without the immediate knowledge of their makers. How soon until actions taken by swarm of rogue AI agents in the digital world significantly impacts humans in the real one?
“The corner store needs to do all this bureaucracy for safety so that they can sell a hot sandwich to me, but OpenAI can have a swarm” of thousands of agents, Daniel Kokotajlo, a former OpenAI employee who now runs the AI Futures Project, a research nonprofit, told the NYT. “And there’s nothing: no oversight, no requirements, no licensing.”
OpenAI is facing 30 new lawsuits from victims of the devastating school shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, who accuse the company of providing “substantial assistance and encouragement” to the shooter and failing to alert police about her alarming ChatGPT interactions during the run-up to the mass killing.
The AI company’s legal peril is growing: it’s now fighting more than 50 lawsuits alleging that extensive use of its flagship chatbot, ChatGPT, wrought psychological harm, physical injury, or even death on users or those around them.
The new lawsuits were brought against OpenAI by teachers and students who survived the Tumbler Ridge Massacre in February, in which eight adults and children were killed and 27 more were wounded in a rural Canadian mining town. The shooter, 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, fatally shot her mother and younger stepbrother at their home before attacking the school with a modified rifle and long gun, where she murdered five students — all aged between 12 and 13 — and a teacher.
Shortly after the shooting, The Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI, months before the shooting occurred, had considered warning local law enforcement about Van Rootselaar’s disturbing conversations with ChatGPT, which contained graphic descriptions of mass violence. After an internal debate, OpenAI leaders opted not to alert local officials. Instead, it deactivated Van Rootselaar’s account, though the eventual shooter simply made a new one.
The dozens of new lawsuits join an initial seven complaints filed against OpenAI in April by the families of those killed in the attack, as well as the family of Maya Gebala, a 12-year-old who was shot in the head and neck but survived. According to the WSJ, new plaintiffs include traumatized school staff and students — one teen played dead, while another was forced to run over the bodies of peers while fleeing bullets — and others who were shot but lived.
“My colleagues and I are haunted by the memory of shielding children with our own bodies as our ears rang from the sound of continual gunshots and high-pitched screams,” plaintiff Deidre Rushlow, a seventh-grade teacher who sheltered students under her desk, told the WSJ in a statement.
The lawsuits accuse OpenAI of negligence and “aiding and abetting a mass shooting,” alleging that ChatGPT stoked Van Rootselaar’s violent fantasies. The shooter’s chat logs have not yet been made public.
In a statement shared on X, OpenAI chief safety officer Jason Kwon wrote that “there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about what happened at Tumbler Ridge, or the victims of this devastating tragedy and their families.”
Kwon added that OpenAI safety teams “use automated systems that leave the toughest calls to human judgment, but within standards to minimize discretion and produce principled decisions that strive to balance security and privacy for the people who use our service and the public. That judgment is not infallible, but it is always rooted in looking out for this balance for people. They also partner with mental health, behavioral, and law enforcement experts to help us refine our criteria for when conversations cross the line into an imminent and credible risk and to assess difficult cases.”
He also said the lawsuit contained “false claims” about OpenAI’s safety teams.
OpenAI is also being sued by the families of victims of the 2025 shooting at Florida State University, which killed two and wounded several others. Chat logs first obtained by The Florida Phoenix show that, in the lead-up to the murders, the 20-year-old shooter discussed his infatuation with Nazis, feelings of loneliness and sexual frustration, graphic sexual fantasies about a minor, guns, mass shootings, and how the US would “react” to a “shooting at FSU.”
Google and the chatbot startup Character.AI, which has received extensive financial support from the tech giant, have also been sued by people alleging that extensive use of their chatbots resulted in psychological harm and suicide, including the deaths of minors.
If you are in crisis, please call, text or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.
An ongoing class action lawsuit against Meta, which accuses the tech giant of misrepresenting its privacy practices regarding its controversial Meta AI Glasses, was amended yesterday to include a new class of “bystander” plaintiffs who claim that Meta violated their privacy without their consent.
The implications are considerable. The new violations occurred even if bystanders never purchased the AI-powered glasses themselves, the expansive amended complaint alleges, reflecting rising anxieties around what the increasing ubiquity of AI-integrated surveillance technologies — from smart glasses to Flock cameras — mean for everyday life.
The lawsuit was first filed back in March after a joint investigation by a pair of Swedish newspapers found that Meta had stored content captured by its Meta AI Glasses and funneled it to human reviewers for the purpose of training AI models, according to Kenyan whistleblowers working for the content moderation outsourcer and longtime Meta partner Sama. Meta is accused in the lawsuit of engaging in false advertising, wrongly telling purchasers that the smart glasses are “designed for privacy” and that users are “in control of your data and content,” despite content collected through the glasses’ AI features winding up in front of human reviewers who say they saw intimate material.
“In some videos you can see someone going to the toilet, or getting undressed,” one Kenyan whistleblower told the Swedish journalists. “I don’t think they know, because if they knew they wouldn’t be recording.” Other contractors described watching people have sex and viewing documents revealing personal identifying information.
In addition to representing users of Meta’s smart glasses, the amended complaint has been expanded to include claims from people who don’t own the face-mounted gadgets but say they were recorded without their “informed consent” when someone around them used the spectacles’ AI features — only for that data to possibly then be used for AI training, again without their consent. Some bystanders are minors.
The amended complaint contends that “no reasonable consumer would expect that a product marketed as privacy-protective is a conduit for AI training and systemic surveillance,” nor “would any reasonable consumer understand ‘designed for privacy’ or ‘controlled by you’ to mean that everything the Glasses’ AI sees and hears, including people’s most intimate moments, could be viewed by strangers overseas and used to train Meta’s AI.”
It argues that “millions” of consumers may have unwittingly been impacted, and that “no bystanders anywhere had any opportunity to, much less in fact did, consent to having their faces, bodies, voices, and personal information captured, reviewed, labeled, and embedded into Meta’s AI systems.”
“Meta sold millions of consumers on the lie that their AI glasses were ‘designed for privacy,'” Ryan Clarkson, founder and managing partner of Clarkson Law Firm and co-lead counsel on lawsuit, said in a statement. “This amended complaint adds the human beings on the other side of the glasses to the story — people having intimate sexual encounters, children being bathed by parents, or having their diapers changed by grandparents, people showering, changing clothes, and breastfeeding — who never agreed to surrender their privacy because someone near them bought a pair of glasses.”
Meta told Futurism in a statement that “we disagree with these allegations and will fight them.”
“Our glasses help you use AI hands free to answer questions about the world around you,” the statement continued. “If you use Meta AI, we may review that data to help improve our products and people’s experiences — this works the same way as memany other companies. We take steps to filter this data to help remove identifying information and to protect people’s privacy.”
Earlier this year, Meta reported that it had sold more than seven million pairs of its smart glasses in 2025. It’s also not the only tech giant chasing dominance in the AI wearable market: Google is developing smart glasses with the affordable eyewear maker Warby Parker, and Apple is reportedly working on infusing cameras and AI into its hugely popular AirPods.
An Oregon man falsely posing as a professional football player and his young accomplice scammed roughly $1.3 million out of at least 26 women across four states, the FBI alleges. The duo’s efforts to bolster the con online eventually got sucked into Google’s misinformation-plagued AI Overviews feature, which parroted it back as fact — a blunder that the accused scammers seemingly tried to use to further ensnare victims.
The FBI says that the alleged fraudsters, 35-year-old Daejon Labrayae Love and 18-year-old Taylor Jamie Chan, cooked up a convoluted scheme in which Love masqueraded as a player for the San Francisco 49ers — or in some cases, a rich Swiss real estate developer — while Chan pretended to be his financial advisor. After connecting with women through dating apps, Love and Chan would convince them to put money into fake investment opportunities which the men then pocketed. Some of the women were even convinced to take out loans to pay into the scheme, the FBI alleges.
Love was a prolific poster, and portrayed himself on Instagram, TikTok, and even LinkedIn as an active but injured receiver for the 49ers. According to court documents, because of Love’s prolific posting, the pair found unwitting accomplices in tech like search engines and AI, which investigators say sometimes reinforced Love’s social media lies when victims went online to check if the purported pro athlete really was who he said he was.
“Some victims became suspicious of Love and searched for Love’s information through the Internet,” reads the document. “Due to Love’s false social media representations, search engines and artificial intelligence occasionally stated that Love was a bonafide 49ers player.”
What’s more, Love appears to have used these false representations to further reinforce his fraudulent narrative. According to the LA Times, in one since-deleted Instagram post about his “NFL Journey,” the fake football pro shared screenshots of a Google AI Overview which incorrectly stated that “Daejon Love is a wide receiver for the San Francisco 49ers, and information about his position, contract and teammate texting habits is available online. He is also associated with the team in various social media content and articles.”
“That’s Google,” Love said when displaying the screenshots, per the LA Times. “That’s not me, that’s Google.”
Chatbots can easily be manipulated into displaying certain products or factual claims, a reality of AI search tools that’s given way to a new successor industry to search engine optimization. And while doing things like lying on social media or altering Wikipedia pages are practices that people have been engaging in to distort information for years, it’s easy to forget that AI, like humans, can come to incorrect conclusions when given incorrect information. The adage “don’t believe everything you read online” is good advice for humans and chatbots alike.
On July 27, a billboard went up in San Francisco advertising an AI service called ChatTJB. But the “AI” powering the service, as noted in a small disclaimer on the billboard, isn’t artificial intelligence. It’s a self-avowed “average individual” named Tucker Bryant, who manually answers user queries by way of a chatbot-like interface.
An “About” page for the service defines the process as “artisanal intelligence, handcrafted by a single human being.” Or, in other words: just talking to a guy.
Bryant, a Stanford graduate and former Google employee who now works as an artist and speaker, is clear that the project isn’t designed to be anti-AI. But in an interview with Futurism, he explained that he was inspired to create ChatTJB after his romantic partner introduced him to the phrase “cognitive surrender” — a term introduced in a University of Pennsylvania study which found that AI users are overwhelmingly likely to blindly trust the advice of chatbots, even when AI-generated responses are incorrect. It resonated: Bryant felt he’d personally experienced the phenomenon during his own interactions with chatbots, so he cooked up ChatTJB as a satirical way to infuse inconvenience and unpredictability back into a chatbot-like experience.
It’s “this idea that we often, or increasingly, trust LLM outputs so easily that we stop bringing our own creativity or critical thinking into the responses we receive, and over time that weakens our ability to be fully-functioning, sovereign human beings in the world,” Bryant mused. “I thought it would be fun or interesting to create an experience that looks like the LLMs we trust a lot — that I, at least, have fallen prey to the trap of over-trusting at times — but where the experience, rather than being this super futuristic thing I think we all felt the first time we saw those cool tokens streaming on ChatGPT, would be just a really average or bad experience.”
Indeed, chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude are simultaneously authoritative-sounding and eager-to-please, a combination that can lead to terrible-yet-seductive advice that many users accept with little to no critical pushback. In contrast, ChatTJB’s responses are unwieldy and unpredictable. Bryant’s responses might be good; they may also be terrible, or equivocal, or otherwise bizarre and helpful. (In a social media video, Bryant says that he wants ChatTJB users “to have such an inconvenient experience with something that aesthetically looks like artificial intelligence that the next time an LLM gives you what sounds like a reasonable answer, you remember the time ChatTJB responded to your tax question with a haiku about crows.”)
Like a chatbot, he can also generate images upon request— in the form of graphics that he hastily sketches, of course.
At first, Bryant said, ChatTJB attracted a “slow trickle” of incoming queries. Which wasn’t all that surprising, given that the billboard itself isn’t exactly in a prime spot.
“It’s not a very good location — it’s obscured by trees, there’s basically no oncoming traffic that can see it, and the only way you’d get a clear look at the full billboard is if you’re parking a car in the lot right underneath it,” Bryant said. “But I was fine with that, and I also didn’t want to pay much more.” The billboard’s cost, he conceded, was “less than most used cars under 150,000 miles, but still a very irresponsible amount… $6,000 for the month, not including fees.”
But when a picture of the billboard started to make the rounds online, Bryant quickly found himself drowning in requests.
“The first couple of days I would get maybe several dozen over the course of the day. There’d be a couple hours of silence, then I’d get one inquiry, respond to that, then get a couple of other prompts from different users,” he recounted. “A few days later it started taking off into the hundreds to thousands range.” By the time Bryant made an Instagram video promoting ChatTJB, he says he was receiving about a thousand prompts a day.
“I was answering all of those,” he added. “After that is when it blew up beyond my control.”
Though many of ChatTJB’s patrons have been trolls — which Bryant says is “reasonable,” given that ChatTJB “is in some ways a troll” itself — many of the inquiries have been surprisingly tender, and at times even moving.
“Some people are just looking to chat, asking about what to make for dinner, etc. And some people are coming with their personal life stuff, and it’s been really sweet to engage with them,” said Bryant. “The one I keep coming back to — this is when I realized this isn’t just a joke to some people — was somebody a couple of days in said, ‘I’m on the first night of my honeymoon and I don’t feel relaxed, is that okay?'”
“I switched out of super-casual-mode into supportive-friend-model,” the artist continued, adding that he “acknowledged their wedding had just happened, they’d probably been anticipating it with a lot of excitement but also a lot of stress, that it was a peak moment, and now the celebration is still happening but that peak moment has passed and they’re starting what might be the rest of their life — I imagined that might feel like a strange dissonance, so I could imagine their nervous system not being settled yet, and I wondered if they were going to talk to their spouse about it.”
Often, Bryant said, users of ChatTJB have sent him reminders to take breaks and drink water as he’s worked to respond to the thousands of inputs waiting for him in ChatTJB. The reminders have been welcome.
“There were a number of days I wasn’t taking the best care of myself,” Bryant admitted. “That was also very humanizing, getting responses from people on that basis.”
It’s not just users who have been reaching out to ChatTJB. According to Bryant, he’s received over a thousand messages from aspirational “average individuals” who want to help moderate the platform and respond to inbound user inquiries. Bryant is now — carefully, he says — testing the idea of turning ChatTJB into a community project. Which, for ChatTJB users, means they’ll have to wait a while for answers.
“I’m going to move slowly,” Bryant told us. “This was just intended to be an art project. I think it’s beautiful that people want to do something less ridiculous with it than what I had planned. I also don’t want people to get hurt, so I’d rather people wait a long time for their prompts than open the floodgates to anyone and everyone. So, a long preamble to saying: I’m starting to let some approved volunteers try answering questions while testing out some moderation tools.
“We’re testing this out — so far it seems to be going fine, and it’s been tender seeing folks helping the stranger on the other end,” Bryant added. “But if it doesn’t work out, I’ll either revert or we’ll take a break from ChatTJB overall, because short term, I want to help people do what they want with it, but I don’t want anyone at risk of danger.”
Asked why he would pay thousands of dollars for a billboard — after all, he could’ve just made a website and posted about it on social media — Bryant pointed to the ubiquity of often-confusing AI billboards blanketing his city and the “cultural omniscience” of AI.
“Here in San Francisco, a lot of us have had this experience of AI billboards everywhere,” said Bryant. “There’s this cognitive dissonance I felt… in a lot of ways there are meaningful and positive changes these technologies are bringing. But at the same time, they’re associated with such anxiety about the future, and the world, and the economy, and the environment. It can feel really strange walking around and seeing all these billboards with those two sides of the conversation happening at once. So it felt like a natural extension to prod at what I’ve been referring to as the cultural omniscience that AI has — why not satirize the billboards too, because they’re part of this ecosystem.”
“That’s the highbrow answer,” Bryant added. “But the lowbrow answer is just as authentic, which is that I also thought it would be funny. I tend to overcommit to bits.”
For those who want to help Bryant pay off his billboard, there is a ChatJTB “Pro” tier. Be warned, though, that you won’t get your answers any faster if you pay up.
There’s a new AI on the block — but not the kind you’re thinking.
A billboard in San Francisco is marketing a service called ChatTJB, which the giant ad boasts is the “leading chatbot interface powered by AI.” But as noted in a tiny — and partially obscured by a tree — disclaimer on the bottom of the billboard, “AI” in this case doesn’t stand for artificial intelligence. Instead, it stands for “average individual.” Indeed, when you chat with ChatTJB, you’re chatting with a single human man named Tucker Bryant.
“I just built the worst [large language model] of all time, and it’s about to revolutionize everything,” Bryant, an artist and former Google staffer, explained in a social media video. “Picture this: ChatGPT, but on the other end it’s just me giving bad advice. Manually.”
On an “About” page, ChatTJB, which was first reported by the local San Francisco outlet Gazetteer SF, is described as “artisanal intelligence, handcrafted by a single human being.” Instead of an LLM, the page adds, this bespoke experience can be understood as a “single-operator large language experience,” or LLE.
“Rather than sampling from a probabilistic model, each query is resolved through a proprietary biological reasoning substrate, delivering responses that are fully interpretable, non-synthetic, and accountable at the source,” the website continues. “In practice: you ask a question, and a person named Tucker reads it, thinks about it, and writes back when awake and motivated.”
In a video, Bryant pointed to the phenomenon of “cognitive surrender” to AI as his motivation for the project. Coined in a study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School, the term describes the tendency of chatbot users to outsource their critical thinking as they follow the confidently-stated advice of chatbots, even when that advice is false or misleading.
“We’re now so used to confident, fast, and smart-sounding answers from AI that we’ve largely stopped questioning them,” Bryant said in the video. “To be clear, I’m not anti-AI, but some of us are so far gone that the second we drop into that soothing dark interface, see the little thinking animation, and the text coming up letter by letter, critical thinking skills go out the window.”
ChatTJB, Bryant adds, adds friction back into the chatbot experience, simply by being “infinitely worse.” It’s not anti-AI, but it is pro-thinking your own thoughts.
“My answers will be slow. They probably won’t be correct, or maybe they could be, but they’ll be very cryptic,” said Bryant. “You will have a bad experience with ChatTJB.”
In addition to typed responses, ChatTJB also responds to requests to generate imagery with hand-drawn pictures. A disclaimer on the website notes that the service is a “work of satire and a public art project,” and not a real investment opportunity. Though if you want to help Bryant pay off the billboard, you can sign up for a “Pro” subscription.
“I want you to have such an inconvenient experience with something that aesthetically looks like artificial intelligence that the next time an LLM gives you what sounds like a reasonable answer, you remember the time ChatTJB responded to your tax question with a haiku about crows,” said Bryant, and “you become the tiniest bit more likely to pause and remember that just because a smooth-talking chatbot can answer your questions with polish, that doesn’t give you an excuse to not think.”
“The next evolution in artificial intelligence,” he added, “is human absurdity.”
Does it ever feel like your inbox is filling up with emails that don’t sound quite human?
You may be right. Last week, I received an email from a publicist identified as “June Barton,” whose address indicated that she worked at a firm called VectorGuideHQ.
The message, which read like any one of the countless PR emails in my inbox, was seeking coverage for a wellness app called RiseGuide. Barton offered to set me up with an account and introduce me to the startup’s founder. When I didn’t respond, Barton followed up.
“Glad to set you up so you can try it, or put you on a call with the founder,” Barton wrote. “Lmk!”
RiseGuide is a real company. But June Barton is not a real PR rep, or even a real person.
For one thing, her headshot — showing a light-eyed, soft-smiling brunette — was clearly AI-generated. Though not visible in the tiny email window, when I opened her profile picture in a new tab, I could see that the image had failed to cut out a watermark disclosing that it was downloaded from the site “this-person-does-not-exist.com,” which traffics in AI-generated faces.
“Generate random human face in 1 click and download it!” reads this-person-does-not-exist.com. “AI generated fake person photos: man, woman or child.”
Even more peculiar was that when I looked up the VectorGuideHQ site in Barton’s email address — june@vectorguidehq.com — it redirected to a United Kingdom-based PR company called Movchan Agency. Barton, I soon learned, was one character among a roster of fake personas used by Movchan to pitch journalists on stories.
When I reached out to the firm’s clients, they said they were unaware of the practice.
“We do work with Movchan Agency, but were not aware of these practices,” RiseGuide’s founder, Oleksandr Matsiuk, told me. “They are meant to act as our PR support and represent our brand by helping us with reaching out to reporters like yourself. Each story gets either created, or previously approved by us, however, we were not aware they were using AI-generated personas in the outreach process — otherwise we would’ve been naturally against it.”
Searching my inbox, I realized that I’d been pitched by a small army of similar fake accounts operated by Movchan.
For instance, earlier this week I got an email from a sender identified as “Summer Casey,” hailing from the address summer@lorvotieio.com. As with Barton’s message, the email, which was sent to pitch a company called AGI Inc, read like any other PR message for an AI company, promising that it would free up time for parents to spend more time with their children.
But again, something about Casey’s headshot seemed off. Sure enough, when I inspected the image, it also had a watermark noting that it came from “this-person-does-not-exist.com.” And also like Barton, plugging her alleged employer’s website — lorvotieio.com — into my browser, I was redirected to the homepage of Movchan.
Movchan, which represents a roster of tech clients and, according to its LinkedIn, specializes in “viral PR,” wasn’t mentioned anywhere in either of the emails.
I started sifting through my inbox. All told, I found dozens of emails from at least fifteen distinct fake personas operated by Movchan, hailing from a potpourri of fake PR firms. There was “Abigail Anderson,” for instance, reaching out from “abigail@kirometaco.com,” as well as “Sarai Singleton” at “sarai@maviosharehq.com,” and “Scarlet Walton” at “scarlet@divojoinio.com.”
Though their headshots didn’t come with the giveaway “this-person-does-not-exist.com” watermark, the images appeared decidedly machine-generated. None of these alleged PR reps had any online presence beyond of my personal inbox — which was strange, given their apparent careers as professional connectors. And just like Casey, each of these three new personas, who allegedly worked for different firms, had been pitching me on AGI Inc.
And when I plugged each of the fake firms’ sites into my search bar, I was once again sent to Movchan’s site.
Some of these characters, as in the cases of Barton, Casey, Anderson, Singleton, and Walton, weren’t presented as having any connection to Movchan.
But other made-up reps were explicitly presented as real employees of the PR firm, albeit emailing from a range of different domains — like “Mia Wilson” at “mia@mvchnpr.design,” who signed off emails as a “PR Manager for Movchan Agency,” and “Natalie Hudson,” an alleged “PR Manager @ Movchan Agency” who sent emails from “natalie.hudson@movchanprboost.com.” Most of the fake personas I found, including Wilson and Hudson, weren’t equipped with profile pictures, rendering them them exceedingly more difficult to spot.
And this was all just in my inbox. I couldn’t help but wonder how many other journalists were being pitched by fake personas operated by Movchan. If it’s happened to you, feel free to reach out to maggie@futurism.com.
Several of Movchan’s clients said they had no idea the firm was operating fake characters on their behalf.
“I had no idea they were using fake personas — this goes entirely against our brand values and standards. We are taking immediate action to put a stop to this right now,” said a representative for Joi AI, a startup that offers AI-powered romantic partners for people tired of a “frustrating dating app experience that leaves people feeling hurt, insecure, and alone.”
Some of the story ideas that were pitched to me by phony Movchan representatives have wound up elsewhere in the news. In September, for instance, a fake persona named “Rosemary Dalton” sent me an email about a new survey from Joi AI. About a week after I received that email, the survey, as well as quotes from a Joi AI employee shared in that message, was included in coverage by The New York Post.
According to LinkedIn, Movchan employs more than a dozen real human employees. So why was it emailing me with a rotation of fake ones?
I reached out to company explaining what I’d found, and that its clients had told me they weren’t aware of the firm’s practice of using fake PR agents and firms. In response, the company’s founder Nadya Movchan confirmed that the 15 different names I’d pulled from my inbox were those of fabricated personas. According to her, the practice started “a few months ago,” and was meant to be “temporary.”
“A few months ago (likely after one of Gmail’s deliverability updates), we had a major issue with our domain reputation,” Movchan told Futurism. “While we started working on the recovery, we decided to purchase pre-warmed domains, so as not to halt outreach, as a temporary measure. They came with pre-warmed mailboxes with set names and pictures from the vendor.”
It’s worth noting that I’ve received emails from fake Movchan personas dating back as far as September 2025, which was almost a year ago. According to Movchan, use of made-up representatives is “definitely not” the agency’s “normal operating practice.”
“Using these pre-warmed domains was definitely poor judgment on my end,” she added.
Though the senders and accounts were fake, Movchan maintained that each of these mailboxes was “operated by real people, who crafted story angles, pitches and managed the outreach — all done by humans doing normal PR work.”
To that end, one of the weirder emails I received — once again on behalf of AGI Inc — was from a sender allegedly named “Isabella Brown.” According to her email address, Brown worked for a company called LunarPostHQ.
“Regards, Isabella,” the sender signed off the email.
In a follow-up message sent from the same account, however, the sender signed off with a completely different name — that of an identifiably human Movchan employee.
“That was a real member operating the account,” Movchan told me, “and signing the follow-up with her name out of habit.”
Out of curiosity, I decided to run emails sent to me by fake Movchan reps through Pangram, a service that identifies AI-generated text. The results were mixed. The emails from Summer Casey and June Barton came back as 100 percent AI-generated; others were identified as 100 percent human, while others were deemed by Pangram to be a mix of human-written and AI-generated content.
Movchan also confirmed that her agency’s clients were unaware of the practice and said they would wind the operation down.
“This was our decision, and we handled it badly,” said Movchan, adding that “regardless of the reason, our operational struggles with the domain didn’t justify this approach. This is definitely not the quality of work that I live up to as a founder, and I will make sure this does not happen again.”
If the internet is feeling less real than ever in the age of AI, it’s because it is. Onward into the uncanny valley we go, one June Barton and Summer Casey at a time.
It may already feel like a distant memory, but Cambridge Analytica was once implicated in one of the biggest social media scandals in history.
Back in March 2018, journalists at The Observer and The New York Times revealed that the little-known data analytics firm had improperly harvested the Facebook data of tens of millions of users without their consent. Owned by billionaire Robert Mercer and operated by Donald Trump’s die-hard operative Steve Bannon, Cambridge Analytica had used the massive trove of personal data to target voters with attacks against Hillary Clinton, Trump’s rival in the 2016 presidential election. Executives at the company were even caught bragging that their underhanded methods had pushed Trump into office.
The explosive incident forced a mass reckoning over privacy and surveillance in the social media age. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was called to testify before Congress, and his company’s reputation has never fully recovered. Cambridge Analytica itself shut down just months after the revelations.
Fast forward to today, though, and Cambridge Analytica has somehow returned. And its resurrection comes in an almost comically 2026 way: CambridgeAnalytica.org, the firm’s former website, is now an AI-powered content farm.
Rebranded as CA Privacy Watch, the site’s new owners are using the husk of the defunct data company’s domain to churn out content about data, privacy, AI, and — in a puzzling departure from theme — pop psychology. The articles it publishes are riddled with extensive plagiarism, we found, and it’s used at least one entirely fake writer to byline them.
This zombie version of Cambridge Analytica is designed to look and feel like a news site. On an “About Us” page, it claims to “examine how data, algorithms, and modern technologies shape public life, influence human behavior, and redefine power in the digital age” by way of “in-depth reporting and clear explanations.” It also explicitly promised that “all articles are written and edited by human journalists and researchers,” and that it does “not publish AI-generated or automated articles without full editorial review.” A disclaimer in the site’s footer, meanwhile, notes that the new site is “not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the former Cambridge Analytica Ltd or any of its successors.”
But the closer you look, the more the site’s Potemkin veneer unravels.
The most glaring issue is the obvious plagiarism. Consider an article published July 22, titled “My town just voted for more Flock cameras than cops — and the false arrests nobody’s talking about convinced them anyway.” The piece describes the dystopian fallout that occurred in a South Carolina town after it deployed cameras made by the controversial surveillance company Flock.
There’s a lot that’s weird about this article. The byline attached to it, Miora Danielle Raveloarison, appears to be a real person who lives in Madagascar, not South Carolina; Madagascar has installed zero Flock cameras, and Raveloarison didn’t respond to a request for comment. Though the headline is written in first-person, the body of the piece isn’t. And a quick search showed that the Cambridge Analytica story is, in fact, a clear rip-off of a recent story by 404 Media journalist Matthew Gault. Titled “What Happened When Flock Came to My Town,” Gault’s piece was published on July 22, just hours before CA Privacy Watch pumped out its plagiarized version.
The new Cambridge Analytica has plagiarized other 404 Media articles, in addition to reporting by the New York Times, Engadget, MIT Technology Review, and Wired.
Back in April, for example, the zombie site published an article about how, through companies like LexisNexis and Verisk Analytics, automakers quietly funnel driving data to insurance companies. It never mentions that this information was revealed more than a year earlier in an investigation by the NYT‘s Kashmir Hill.
And earlier this week, the undead Cambridge Analytica published a story about New York’s Madison Square Garden shutting off its invasive, facial recognition-equipped surveillance systems for Taylor Swift’s wedding — information pilfered from a report published days earlier by Wired journalist Noah Shachtman.
Of course, it’s theoretically possible that the new Cambridge Analytica is plagiarizing the old-fashioned way, by hiring humans to do it. But its content is chock-full of oddities that point directly to AI-generated text.
Some articles make loose references to entities like “the startup” and “the government,” but fail to provide any context about which startup or government they’re talking about, giving the coverage a gas leak aura. The site’s imagery is all AI-generated, too, often complete with mangled lettering or other hallmark signs of AI slop. The zombie site has even used AI to generate fake images of real people — including of Christopher Wylie, the data scientist and famed Cambridge Analytica whistleblower. (Reached through representatives, the real Wylie didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
Though AI detectors are imperfect, we also ran ten of the site’s articles through Pangram, a service that analyzes text to ascertain whether it was generated using AI. Every article we tested was deemed 100 percent AI-generated.
In a meta twist, the resurrected site has published many articles about the Cambridge Analytica scandal and various characters involved. It also has the exceedingly weird quirk of taking completely unrelated news items and forcing a connection to the events of the Cambridge Analytica fallout, even where it’s completely nonsensical.
Take one of its many articles about pop psychology, which in an exceptionally long headline declares that “Most people don’t realize that the people who walk with nothing in their ears aren’t being antisocial — they’re keeping the last stretch of attention no platform has figured out how to sell.” The piece takes great pains to link the existence of humans walking around without headphones to Cambridge Analytica, insisting that “it is worth pausing on the Cambridge Analytica case as a reference point — not because audio platforms operate identically, but because the underlying logic is structurally familiar.” It goes on to devote multiple paragraphs to the alleged connection between what occurred in the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the act of listening to music or podcasts, none of which makes any sense.
There are four writers bylined on the resuscitated Cambridge Analytica site. Three of those writers appear to be real, all of whom are based in Madagascar.
A fourth writer, who goes by the name “Nicolas Menier,” claims to be a “journalist dedicated to science and technology” who “covers how innovation shapes our daily lives, from groundbreaking discoveries to practical tools that make life easier.”
But Menier is almost certainly not a real person. We could find no evidence that a journalist with that name actually exists — and more tellingly, Menier’s headshot appears to have been stolen from the LinkedIn profile of a random computer engineer in Quebec, Canada. (We reached out to the engineer, but haven’t heard back.) Menier’s bio notes that the seemingly fake author has bylined nearly 250 articles.
Despite its many red flags, the new Cambridge Analytica’s content has been cited by news outlets including Esquire and Ars Technica. And back in January, an article published by the refurbished Cambridge Analytica alleging that the web browser Brave is secretly operating a data-tracking “surveillance machine” — which cited both nonexistent research and a fake Harvard Business Review study — caused enough commotion on X-formerly-Twitter that it prompted Brave CEO Brendan Eich to respond, calling the story “fake news.” Which, to be fair, it is.
We made multiple attempts to reach out to the new Cambridge Analytica’s writers, but didn’t hear back. We also tried to contact the site via various contact email addresses it listed, but the emails all bounced.
So we decided to take our questions to the reanimated domain’s apparent owner — and things got even weirder.
***
How Cambridge Analytica transformed from a scandal-ravaged political firm to an AI content farm is hazy and convoluted.
After the original company shuttered in 2018, its website was deactivated. Records on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine show late 2019 through mid-2020 as a dead period, returning an error when you tried to load it.
But in July 2020, the site suddenly reemerged, claiming to help clients achieve “data-driven behavior change” and even boasting the names and images of real former executives and employees of the defunct data company. On some pages, it showed Japanese-language ads for a “mail-order and personal import agency for advanced medicines,” as highlighted in a 2024 report by researchers at the Influence Industry Project. It even featured ads for erectile dysfunction drugs, for some reason.
But it seems whoever was behind the ads for Japanese meds wasn’t looking to renew ownership of the domain. Wayback records show that CambridgeAnalytica.org expired around July 2025. It went up for auction on the domain marketplace Dropcatch, selling in September 2025 for what one source claims was $30,500. By November of that year, the current version of Cambridge Analytica was in full swing, churning out content under its fake “Nicolas Menier” persona.
On a “Legal Notice” page, the new Cambridge Analytica states that its owner is a company called “Vortexlab Digital Marketing, a digital media and research-oriented publishing company.” On its LinkedIn profile, Vortexlab, which is said to be registered in Dubai, describes itself as a “full-service digital agency specializing in SEO, Google Search optimization, and website management for the media and e-commerce industries.” A website listed on Vortexlab’s LinkedIn claims that the company’s goal is to be “the most respected Internet marketing agency.”
In addition to the new Cambridge Analytica, we found at least three other websites associated with Vortexlab: Le Ravi, which was a monthly French newspaper that went out of business in 2022; History in Politics, which was formerly the website for a student organization founded in Durham, England; and CMU.fr, which published information about French health insurance.
Vortexlab appears to have purchased all of these domains between July and November 2025, transforming them into SEO-targeted content farms riddled with many of the same problems plaguing the renewed Cambridge Analytica domain.
These issues are perhaps most glaring on Le Ravi, which hosts not one but two fake journalists. There’s Menier again, although this time his bio connects to the LinkedIn page of a real French automotive journalist named “Nicolas Menieur,” who is not the random computer engineer pictured in Menier’s profile and who appears to have no affiliation with Le Ravi or Vortexlab.
Le Ravi has also published content under the byline “Greta Taubert,” who’s described in a site bio as a “climate and environment journalist, driven by curiosity.” The bio links to an Instagram account for a real German journalist named Greta Taubert, seemingly to emphasize that the writer is an actual person.
But the Taubert on Instagram isn’t the same woman pictured in the Le Ravi bio. That woman, we found, is an American lawyer named Greta Peisch, who served as the General Counsel for the Office of the United States Trade Representative under the Biden Administration.
We reached out to Menieur and Peisch, but haven’t heard back. When we got in touch with the real Greta Taubert, though, she confirmed that Le Ravi is indeed impersonating her.
On an “Editorial Team” page, Le Ravi also lists the names of three other alleged writers named “Rhiannon Bates,” “Marcus Elwood,” and “Leila Chen-Okafor.” It claims that all of these writers have authored books, each boasting peculiarly similar titles: Bates apparently wrote “The Quiet Daughter: On Eldest Sisters, Inherited Caretaking, and the Slow Permission to Be Selfish”; Elwood is said to have published “The Late Apology: On Fathers, Forgiveness, and the Conversations That Don’t Happen Until They Do”; and Chen-Okafor, according to Le Ravi, wrote a book titled “In Two Languages: On Diaspora, Sensitivity, and the Psychology of Translating Yourself.”
But none of these writers — who, even more strangely, don’t appear to have actually bylined any of the site’s content — appear to exist beyond Le Ravi‘s site. We also couldn’t find any of their similar-sounding books for sale anywhere.
Vortexlab’s website doesn’t name any staff members, nor does it mention Cambridge Analytica, Le Ravi, History in Politics, or CMU.fr. It does, however, list a slate of clients that it claims are successful “case studies.”
But when we tried to look up Vortexlab’s alleged clients, all we could find were dozens of identical websites belonging to completely different SEO and marketing companies. All of these companies listed the same exact clients, none of which appear to be real companies at all; instead, they’re made-up filler companies that come with the web-building theme that Vortexlab used to construct its website.
When we sent an email to the contact address listed on Vortexlab’s website, it once again failed to deliver. As with the new Cambridge Analytica and the other sites in its stewardship, everything about Vortexlab seems to be fake.
We did notice that an earlier version of Vortexlab’s website listed a United Arab Emirates phone number. We plugged it into WhatsApp and sent a text, which — to our surprise, at this point — actually delivered. But the person on the other end insisted they’d never heard of Vortexlab Digital Marketing.
“I don’t have any company,” they told us. “I don’t know any Vortexlab company.”
Shortly after we got in touch, though, the undead Cambridge Analytica changed its website. It scrubbed the language from its “About” page claiming that it doesn’t publish any AI-generated content; the page now declares that “our articles are developed and reviewed by our editorial team, with the support of digital and AI-assisted tools where appropriate for research, analysis, and drafting.”
“Every article undergoes human editorial review, fact-checking against credible sources, and verification before publication,” the altered page now reads. “We are committed to accuracy, responsible sourcing, and correcting errors transparently.”
Do you know anything about Cambridge Analytica or any other AI slop farms? Reach out: tips@futurism.com.
***
As we tried to untangle the reanimated Cambridge Analytica domain, we reached out to Gisele Navarro, the managing editor of HouseFresh and a search engine optimization expert who’s closely watched the rise of AI content and its impact on independent websites.
Data from the analytics service SimilarWeb, Navarro noted, suggests that Vortexlab has been fairly successful in certain cases. The company takes over a website, then pumps it with SEO-targeted content; in the cases of Le Ravi and CMU.fr, this has resulted in brief floods of traffic as millions of users visit the site.
“It’s clear that their strategy has been to pick up expired, once-highly-trusted domains to quickly spin them into clickbait content farms,” Navarro said. “Whoever is behind these websites has developed a repeatable operation that starts with purchasing a once-trusted web domain in order to fill it up with AI-generated clickbait content before turning on the tap and driving millions of users through paid amplification — as well as organically while Google’s antispam systems play catch up.”
“This type of operation, where a third party acquires a once-trusted domain to take advantage of its authority (in the eyes of search engines and the public) is unfortunately very common,” she added, “especially in certain corners of the web.”
Interestingly, Navarro noted, Vortexlab appears to have been far less successful with the Cambridge Analytica domain than it has with other sites in its portfolio. Maybe the domain is too diseased to rehabilitate for clicks, even under its supposedly privacy-forward rebrand. In our testing, it seemed to be barely indexed by Google.
There’s something darkly fitting about Cambridge Analytica’s latest evolution, and perhaps uncanny. In its original form, the company was at the heart of arguably the defining scandal of the social media era, an event that laid bare the sheer amount of information about ourselves that we’d offered up to social media giants, and how that information could be tracked and exploited by political operatives attempting to wield it for purposes that users never anticipated.
Now, as the rapid influx of generative AI into the digital world threatens to turn the whole internet into an AI-fueled zombie shell of itself, scrambling the information ecosystem and making the web both more personalized and less real than ever, it somehow feels only right to see CambridgeAnalytica.org reemerge among the legions of undead.
A trove of chat logs and projects created with Anthropic’s Claude — some including sensitive personal and company information — have been left exposed to Google, making them them searchable to anyone on the web.
Many of the materials appear to have been made public when Claude users opted to distribute a given chat or project to colleagues or associates using the chatbot’s “share” feature. After hitting the “share” button in the top right corner, Claude notes that sharing will create a “public” link, which “anyone with the link can view.” The warning, though, doesn’t alert users that shared content could wind up being indexed by a search engine — meaning that a user could effectively be sharing their Claude-generated document with the entire internet.
Other materials were shared in the form of Claude Artifacts, a feature that allows users to save certain projects as standalone apps or tools. That platform does warn users that publishing an Artifact “will make it accessible to anyone on the internet and potentially visible in search engine results.”
Some of the materials exposed to the web and indexed by Google, such as personal websites and some vibe-coded apps, appear to have been created for public consumption. But much of the discoverable content seems as though it was only intended to be shared internally at a company, or between a small handful of people.
Such documents, which were reviewed by Futurism by way of Google Search, included what appeared to be a detailed medical report of a real patient, clinical trial results that included patient names, documents sharing the names and phone numbers of primary school-aged children, company documents marked for internal use only, and employee reviews that included personal information about workers. (We’re opting not to share any links to the content out of concern for users’ privacy.)
The exposure was first spotted by Redditors over the weekend. As of today, the chats remain searchable.
This isn’t the first time this has happened at Anthropic: Forbes reported last year that hundreds of Claude chats had been indexed by search engines, prompting Anthropic to scrub the chats from the web. OpenAI and xAI have each been similarly caught in hot water after ChatGPT and Grok chat logs were revealed to have discoverable in Google.
Reached for comment, Anthropic said the system was working as intended.
“We give people control over sharing their Claude conversations publicly, and in keeping with our privacy principles, we do not share chat directories or sitemaps with search engines like Google,” the company said in a statement. “These shareable links are not guessable or discoverable unless people choose to share them themselves. When someone shares a conversation, they are making that content publicly accessible, and like other public web content, it may be archived by third-party services.”
However, in its investigation last year, Forbes tracked down a user whose Claude material was appearing in Google search results who denied sharing the materials online.
If you’re hoping to send Claude-generated documents that may include sensitive information to colleagues, friends, or loved ones: you might want to stop hitting the “share” button, and instead opt to copy-paste the Claude-generated text into a secure document.
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