Escolher um ventilador pode parecer simples até o momento em que começam a surgir números de potência, quantidade de pás, diâmetro da hélice e diferentes modelos. É nesta hora que surgem as dúvidas sobre o que considerar na hora de escolher o aparelho ideal para a sua casa.
Na prática, nenhuma dessas características e especificações deve ser analisada sozinha. O desempenho do equipamento depende da combinação entre motor, hélice e vazão de ar, enquanto fatores como ruído, consumo e tipo de instalação determinam se aquele ventilador realmente combina com a rotina e o cômodo onde será colocado.
Para te ajudar nessa escolha, o Canaltech preparou uma guia com 10 pontos que merecem atenção antes da compra do ventilador:
Pense em onde o ventilador será usado;
Escolha o tipo de ventilador mais adequado;
Confira a capacidade de ventilação;
Observe o diâmetro e o desenho da hélice;
Leve o nível de ruído em consideração;
Compare consumo e eficiência energética;
Veja quais ajustes e recursos realmente serão úteis;
Avalie o material e a construção;
Pense na limpeza antes mesmo de comprar;
Confira voltagem, instalação e garantia.
1. Pense em onde o ventilador será usado
Antes mesmo de comparar especificações, é importante definir onde o ventilador vai ficar. Isso porque um aparelho para o quarto, por exemplo, pode exigir características diferentes de outro que será instalado na sala, cozinha ou escritório.
O tamanho do ambiente também entra nessa conta. Cômodos maiores exigem melhor distribuição do ar, enquanto um modelo compacto pode ser suficiente quando a ideia é ventilar uma área pequena ou atender apenas uma pessoa.
A quantidade de pessoas que costuma ocupar o espaço também pode pesar, visto que um ambiente amplo e movimentado demanda uma circulação de ar diferente daquela necessária em um pequeno escritório usado individualmente.
Qual ventilador escolher para cada cômodo?
Para um quarto, características como baixo nível de ruído e diferentes velocidades ganham importância, principalmente para quem pretende deixar o aparelho ligado durante a noite e não quer ter a rotina de sono atrapalhada pelo equipamento.
Em salas maiores, pode fazer sentido buscar por modelos capazes de distribuir o vento por uma área mais ampla. Já em cozinhas, áreas de serviço e outros espaços com pouco espaço livre no chão, um ventilador de parede pode evitar que o aparelho ocupe uma superfície ou fique no caminho.
Isso significa que não existe um único modelo capaz de atender todos os contextos de uso, e o ambiente é justamente o ponto de partida para decidir quais especificações realmente merecem prioridade.
2. Escolha o tipo de ventilador mais adequado
Mesa, coluna, parede, teto e torre estão entre alguns dos formatos encontrados no mercado. Apesar de todos terem a função de movimentar o ar para aumentar a sensação de conforto, cada modelo favorece um tipo de uso.
Vale ressaltar também que um modelo maior não é necessariamente uma evolução direta de outro menor. Mobilidade, espaço disponível e forma como o vento deve chegar às pessoas são diferenças que precisam entrar na escolha.
Ventilador de mesa
Os modelos de mesa estão entre os mais simples de transportar e podem ser colocados sobre móveis ou outras superfícies com certa facilidade. Isso favorece quem pretende mudar o aparelho de lugarao longo do dia, ou até mesmo aquelas pessoas que têm pouco espaço para posicionar o equipamento.
Normalmente, esse tipo de aparelho faz mais sentido em ambientes pequenos ou quando o vento será direcionado para uma região específica, como cama, sofá ou mesa de trabalho.
Ventilador de coluna
Esse formato de ventilador se destaca por colocar a hélice em uma posição mais alta, permitindo também regular a altura do aparelho de acordo com a necessidade do cômodo.
Trata-se de uma boa alternativa para quem quer um ventilador de chão com vento direcionável, mas pretende atender uma área maior ou posicionar o fluxo de ar acima de móveis e outros obstáculos. Mesmo sendo mais alto do que os equipamentos de mesa, seu formato não ocupa muito espaço no ambiente.
Ventilador de teto
O ventilador de teto movimenta o ar a partir de uma posição central e consegue distribuí-lo por uma área ampla sem ocupar espaço no chão.
No entanto, é uma solução fixa, que exige instalação adequada. Por isso, a escolha precisa considerar não apenas desempenho, mas também as dimensões do ambiente e o local onde o equipamento será montado.
Ventilador de parede
Assim como o modelo de teto, a principal diferença deste tipo de aparelho está justamente na instalação. Como permanece fixo e fora do piso, o ventilador de parede pode ser interessante para economizar espaço no ambiente.
Esse formato aparece com frequência em cozinhas, áreas comerciais, salões e outros locais nos quais deixar um aparelho no chão poderia atrapalhar a circulação.
O ponto de atenção em relação a esse formato é a necessidade de furar a parede para fixar o dispositivo no local. Diante disso, é necessário levar em conta fatores como peso e vibração na hora de instalar o aparelho.
Ventilador de torre
Os ventiladores de torre utilizam um corpo estreito e vertical, características até certo ponto semelhantes aos modelos de coluna, e que ajudam a ocupar uma área menor no piso. Alguns modelos também oferecem oscilação para distribuir o ar lateralmente.
Esse formato pode interessar principalmente quando espaço e design compactopesam na decisão. Vale, no entanto, comparar a capacidade de ventilação de diferentes opções em vez de assumir que o formato por si só vai entregar desempenho superior.
3. Confira a capacidade de ventilação
Uma das especificações mais importantes para descobrir em relação a quanto um ventilador consegue movimentar de ar é a vazão. Esse dado pode aparecer em unidades como metros cúbicos por segundo (m³/s) e ajuda a colocar o desempenho do aparelho em números.
De forma simplificada, quanto maior a vazão, maior é o volume de ar movimentado pelo equipamento em determinado período. Por isso, essa informação pode ser mais útil para comparar desempenho do que observar apenas a potência do motor.
O próprio Programa Brasileiro de Etiquetagem (PBE) do Inmetro considera a vazão nominal, potência elétrica e rotação, entre outros dados, na avaliação dos ventiladores.
Ainda assim, é importante comparar aparelhos de categorias e dimensões semelhantes. Um ventilador de teto e um modelo de mesa podem distribuir o ar de maneiras bastante diferentes mesmo quando alguns números da ficha técnica parecem próximos.
Potência significa que o ventilador venta mais?
Não necessariamente. A potência indicada em watts (W) mostra quanta potência elétrica o equipamento utiliza, mas não determina sozinha a quantidade de vento produzida.
Isso porque dois ventiladores com potência semelhante podem apresentar vazões diferentes devido a fatores como:
Diâmetro da hélice;
Formato das pás;
Rotações do motor;
Projeto aerodinâmico.
Da mesma forma, um aparelho que utiliza mais energia não obrigatoriamente entregará um ganho proporcional no fluxo de ar para o ambiente. Por isso, a potência faz mais sentido quando analisada junto à vazão e à eficiência do equipamento.
4. Observe o diâmetro da hélice e o desenho das pás
O tamanho da hélice também interfere na forma como o ar é movimentado no ambiente. Um diâmetro maior aumenta a área percorrida pelas pás e pode ajudar o ventilador a distribuir o fluxo de ar por uma região mais ampla.
Isso, no entanto, não significa que um equipamento com hélice de maior diâmetro será sempre a melhor escolha. Rotação, formato das pás, inclinação e características do motor também são cruciais para definir o desempenho do aparelho.
Em um cômodo pequeno, por exemplo, um aparelho compacto pode atender perfeitamente ao uso e ainda ocupar menos espaço. Já em ambientes maiores, a melhor opção pode ser um ventilador com hélice de maior diâmetro, desde que o restante do conjunto consiga entregar uma boa vazão de ar.
Quantas pás um ventilador precisa ter para ventilar bem?
Não existe um número “mágico” de pás que garanta um ventilador mais forte. Por exemplo, um aparelho de oito pás não necessariamente produzirá mais vento que outro equipado com seis.
Isso acontece porque o desempenho depende de como as pás trabalham em conjuntocom o motor. Diâmetro da hélice, formato, inclinação e velocidade de rotação interferem na quantidade e na forma como o ar é deslocado.
Por isso, a quantidade de pás deve ser tratada apenas como uma das características do modelo a ser analisada. Ao comparar dois produtos, vale dar mais atenção à vazão e ao desempenho do conjunto do que simplesmente escolher aquele com mais pás.
5. Leve o nível de ruído em consideração
A força do vento não é a única característica que determina se um ventilador será confortável no dia a dia. Dependendo do local de uso, o barulho produzido pelo equipamento pode pesar tanto quanto o desempenho na hora de escolher o modelo ideal.
Esse cuidado é importante para aparelhos destinados ao quarto ou escritório. Um ruído que passa despercebido durante o dia pode incomodar bastante durante o sono, uma leitura ou uma reunião de trabalho.
Quando a fabricante informa o nível sonoro em decibéis (dB), o dado pode ajudar na comparação entre modelos. Também vale verificar testes e avaliações feitas em diferentes velocidades, já que um ventilador pode ser bastante silencioso no nível mínimo e produzir bem mais ruído quando colocado na intensidade máxima.
Além do próprio motor, o som pode ser influenciado pela movimentação do ar, desenho das pás, vibração e construção do equipamento. Por isso, classificações como “silencioso” devem ser acompanhadas, sempre que possível, de testes práticos ou medições.
6. Compare consumo e eficiência energética
Um ventilador pode permanecer ligado por várias horas seguidas, principalmente durante períodos de calor. Por isso, alguns watts de diferença podem se acumular ao longo do mês e acabar pesando na conta de luz.
Mas potência e eficiência não devem ser encaradas como sinônimos. Um equipamento eficiente é aquele que consegue movimentar uma boa quantidade de ar para a energia utilizada, e não simplesmente aquele que apresenta o menor número de watts.
O Inmetro mantém no Sistema PBE uma base com ventiladores etiquetados, na qual é possível consultar características como potência, vazão e classificação de eficiência. Ventiladores domésticos de mesa, parede e coluna, além de circuladores abrangidos pela regulamentação, precisam ser certificados e exibir a Etiqueta Nacional de Conservação de Energia.
Ventilador mais potente gasta mais energia?
Quando todo o restante é semelhante, um motor de maior potência pode apresentar consumo elétrico maior. Mas isso não significa que todo ventilador potente será necessariamente menos eficiente.
Um modelo pode consumir mais watts e também movimentar consideravelmente mais ar, enquanto outro pode utilizar menos energia, mas entregar uma vazão bem menor. É justamente essa relação entre consumo e desempenho que precisa ser levada em conta na hora de analisar um modelo.
Outro fator importante é a rotina de uso do ventilador. Um aparelho de 150 W utilizado duas horas por dia pode consumir menos energia no mês que um ventilador de 80 W funcionando durante toda a noite.
Como calcular quanto o ventilador gasta?
Para estimar o consumo mensal de um ventilador, basta localizar a potência do equipamento em watts nas suas especificações e considerar por quantas horas ele permanecerá ligado:
Potência (W) × horas de uso por dia × dias de uso ÷ 1.000 = consumo em kWh
Se usarmos como referência um ventilador de 100 W utilizado durante oito horas por dia, período usado como padrão para uma noite de sono, ao longo de 30 dias, a conta seria:
100 × 8 × 30 ÷ 1.000 = 24 kWh por mês
Para transformar esse consumo em reais, é necessário multiplicar o resultado pela tarifa de energia da cidade. Nos cálculos do Canaltech, usamos como referência uma tarifa padrão de R$ 0,95/kWh para São Paulo.
24 kWh × R$ 0,95 = R$ 22,80 por mês
Ou seja, nesse exemplo, um ventilador de 100 W ligado por oito horas por dia durante 30 dias teria um custo estimado de R$ 22,80 no mês na capital paulista.
7. Veja quais ajustes e recursos realmente serão úteis
A quantidade de velocidades é uma das características mais comuns, mas existem ventiladores com recursos como oscilação, inclinação, timer e controle remoto.
A oscilação permite distribuir o vento por uma área maior em vez de deixá-lo apontado continuamente para a mesma direção. Já a inclinação oferece um ajuste semelhante no eixo vertical, algo útil quando o ventilador fica acima ou abaixo da posição das pessoas.
Nos modelos de coluna, o ajuste de altura também pode ajudar a direcionar melhor o fluxo de ar. Aparelhos com controle remoto e timer, por sua vez, ganham relevância quando utilizados no quarto, permitindo mudar a velocidade ou programar o desligamento sem sair da cama.
8. Avalie o material e a construção
Plástico e metal são encontrados em diferentes partes dos ventiladores, desde a carcaça até grades, bases e componentes da hélice. Mais importante do que procurar um único material, no entanto, é verificar se a construção faz sentido para o local e a frequência de uso.
Um ventilador de torre, por exemplo, precisa ter base estávelpara permanecer firme durante a oscilação. Encaixes frágeis, folgas e vibrações excessivas também podem afetar a experiência ao longo do tempo.
Em regiões litorâneas ou ambientes sujeitos à umidade, a resistência à corrosão ganha importância. Isso acontece porque peças metálicas sem proteção adequada podem ficar mais expostas à ação da maresia, reduzindo a vida útil do equipamento.
9. Pense na limpeza antes mesmo de comprar
Poeira tende a se acumular nas grades e nas pás com o uso do ventilador. Por isso, um questionamento aparentemente simples na hora de adquirir o dispositivo pode fazer diferença meses depois: é fácil desmontar e limpar o equipamento?
Modelos com grades de remoção simples facilitam o acesso às pás e outras partes que acumulam sujeira. Ainda assim, é sempre importante seguir as instruções do fabricante e retirar o equipamento da tomada antes de iniciar qualquer limpeza.
Manter essas regiões limpas também ajuda a preservar a passagem de ar e evita que o acúmulo de poeira prejudique o desempenho do aparelho e a qualidade do ar no ambiente.
10. Confira voltagem, instalação e garantia
Depois de analisar desempenho e recursos, ainda existem algumas especificações básicas que não podem ser esquecidas. Uma delas é a tensão elétrica.
Ventiladores podem ser vendidos em versões de 127 V, 220 V ou bivolt, dependendo do modelo. Por isso, é importante confirmar a tensão disponível no local antes da compra, principalmente em aparelhos que não oferecem seleção automática.
Nos ventiladores de parede e teto, a instalação também precisa entrar no planejamento. Fixação, estrutura disponível, posicionamento e ligação elétrica devem seguir as orientações da fabricante.
Quando o procedimento envolver a rede elétrica ou exigir adaptações, a instalação por parte de um profissional especializado ajuda a evitar improvisos.
Por fim, vale verificar o tempo de garantia e assistência técnicaoferecidos pela fabricante. Esses fatores ganham ainda mais importância em modelos fixos ou mais caros, nos quais uma eventual manutenção pode demandar mais trabalho do consumidor.
O que olhar antes de comprar um ventilador?
A melhor escolha de ventilador não costuma estar no maior número impresso na caixa. Potência, quantidade de pás e diâmetro ajudam a entender o aparelho, mas precisam ser considerados em conjunto com especificações como vazão, eficiência, ruído e tipo de uso.
Antes de decidir qual modelo comprar, vale fazer um “check” final nesses fatores:
Ambiente e área disponível;
Tipo de ventilador;
Vazão de ar;
Potência;
Diâmetro e projeto da hélice;
Nível de ruído;
Eficiência energética;
Ajustes;
Facilidade de limpeza;
Voltagem e garantia.
A ficha técnica mostra parte dessa história. Quando possível, avaliações práticas também ajudam a descobrir como o ventilador se comporta na velocidade máxima, quanto ruído produz e se consegue movimentar o ar da maneira esperada para aquele ambiente.
A possibilidade de trocar a smart TV por um projetor 4K pode parecer tentadora para quem busca uma tela maior e uma experiência mais próxima à de um cinema em casa. A dúvida é se essa troca faz sentido quando o aparelho é usado em situações comuns do dia a dia, especialmente em uma sala com bastante entrada de luz.
Isso porque é justamente nesse cenário que as diferenças começam a aparecer. Enquanto a televisão produz a própria iluminação da imagem, o projetor depende da luz enviada à parede, o que pode tornar a claridade do ambiente um fator determinante para a experiência do usuário.
Para descobrir se um projetor 4K consegue realmente assumir o lugar da smart TV, o Canaltech colocou dois aparelhos dessa categoria frente a frente em um ambiente claro. Para ampliar o comparativo e entender como a categoria dos equipamentos interfere na experiência, repetimos o teste também com uma configuração Full HD, tanto na TV quanto no projetor.
Como os testes foram feitos?
Os aparelhos foram testados em ambientes claros e sob as mesmas condições dentro de cada comparativo. Janelas e outras entradas de luz foram mantidas abertas durante a experiência justamente para avaliar como os projetores se comportariam em uma situação menos favorável.
Também evitamos alterações nas configurações de fábrica de imagem e áudio. Ainda que os dispositivos ofereçam diferentes ajustes de brilho, contraste, modos de imagem e som, o objetivo foi observar aquilo que o consumidor encontraria ao ligar os aparelhos e começar a utilizá-los.
Vale destacar que os projetores foram usados diretamente na parede, sem uma tela própria para projeção, enquanto o áudio ficou por conta dos alto-falantes integrados de cada dispositivo. Uma tela adequada pode melhorar a experiência com o projetor, então os resultados devem ser considerados dentro dessas condições.
Projetor 4K se aproxima da TV em sala clara
O primeiro cenário de testes foi com o projetor JMGO N1S Ultimate 4K e a Smart TV LG NanoCell NANO90SNA. São dois produtos de nível mais avançado, ambos com resolução 4K, o que fez com que esse fosse o comparativo em que o projetor mais conseguiu se aproximar da experiência oferecida pelo televisor.
Instalação
A instalação do JMGO foi bastante rápida e o aparelho ficou posicionado sobre uma mesa. Um dos recursos que mais facilita o uso é o ajuste automático da projeção.
Após posicionar o aparelho e apontá-lo para a parede, o projetor consegue redimensionar e enquadrar a imagem sem exigir regulagens manuais. Isso faz diferença principalmente para quem pretende guardar o equipamento quando não estiver usando ou levá-lo de um cômodo para outro.
A JMGO também permite movimentar fisicamente a projeção em diferentes ângulos por meio do suporte articulado.
O Google TV integrado também deixa a experiência próxima à de uma smart TV tradicional. Ainda assim, quem utiliza dispositivos externos, como TV sticks, pode conectar o acessório e continuar usando a interface à qual já está acostumado.
Reprodução em ambiente claro
Foi neste cenário que o projetor conseguiu lidar melhor com a iluminação do ambiente. Mesmo com janelas abertas e luzes acesas, a imagem continuou definida o suficiente para assistir aos conteúdos sem grandes dificuldades.
Parte desse resultado pode ser explicada pelas próprias especificações do JMGO. Além da resolução 4K, ele utiliza três fontes de laser para formar as cores e alcança 3.300 ISO lúmens, medida usada para indicar a quantidade de luz entregue pelo projetor.
Na prática, trata-se de um modelo pensado para entregar uma boa imagem mesmo em ambientes mais claros.
Ainda assim, a TV da LG manteve vantagem na qualidade da imagem. Além do painel 4K, o televisor trabalha a 120 Hz e possui controle de iluminação por diferentes áreas da tela, recurso chamado Full Array Local Dimming e que ajuda a preservar melhor o contraste.
A projeção ficou um pouco mais clara em comparação direta com a TV, mas o resultado foi especialmente positivo em vídeos do YouTube, inclusive conteúdos com bastante movimento. Mesmo com a interferência da iluminação do ambiente, cores e detalhes permaneceram visíveis e a claridade não chegou a comprometer a experiência.
Em séries e filmes, a diferença para a TV ficou um pouco mais perceptível, principalmente em cenas menos iluminadas. Ainda assim, foi possível acompanhar o conteúdo com certa tranquilidade.
Áudio
O áudio foi outro ponto positivo do equipamento da JMGO. O sistema integrado conseguiu preencher bem o ambiente e trouxe uma sensação de imersão suficiente para assistir aos conteúdos sem a necessidade de uma caixa de som ou soundbar.
O projetor possui um sistema de áudio de 20 W, além de suporte à tecnologia Dolby Digital Plus. São especificações que ajudam a explicar por que o som deu conta de preencher um ambiente relativamente amplo.
Projetor Full HD sente mais a luz do ambiente
O segundo cenário colocou frente a frente o projetor Epson EF-61G e a Smart TV Philips 43PFG6917/78. Os dois trabalham com resolução Full HD e ajudam a mostrar como a experiência pode mudar quando saímos dos equipamentos 4K mais avançados usados no primeiro comparativo.
Neste caso, a diferença entre projetor e televisão apareceu de maneira mais evidente quando o ambiente ficou claro.
Instalação
Assim como aconteceu com o JMGO, colocar o Epson para funcionar não trouxe grandes dificuldades. O processo básico envolve conectar o projetor à tomada, fazer as primeiras configurações e emparelhar o controle remoto.
Também é possível usar o Google TV integrado ao próprio aparelho ou conectar um dispositivo externo. No teste, optamos por um Fire TV Stick com aplicativos e contas já configurados, bastando conectar o acessório à entrada HDMI e selecionar a fonte correspondente pelo controle.
A maior facilidade apareceu no posicionamento. Mesmo colocado sobre uma mesa e de maneira lateral em relação à parede, o Epson conseguiu corrigir automaticamente a projeção e deixar a imagem enquadrada sem exigir ajustes manuais.
O aparelho também consegue identificar obstáculos na área de projeção, exibindo um aviso para que a interferência seja corrigida e alertando sobre riscos do contato direto da luz do projetor com os olhos.
No geral, a experiência mostrou que a necessidade de posicionar e configurar um projetor deixou de ser um grande obstáculo nesse tipo de produto. Pelo menos nos dois modelos testados, colocar o aparelho para funcionar foi tão simples quanto poderia se esperar de uma televisão.
Reprodução em ambiente claro
A situação mudou quando começamos a avaliar a imagem. O Epson conseguiu reproduzir filmes, vídeos do YouTube e até partidas de futebol em um cômodo com bastante entrada de luz, mas a claridade do ambiente teve um impacto mais evidente do que no cenário 4K.
O EF-61G possui resolução Full HD e entrega 700 lúmens de brilho, além de utilizar a tecnologia 3LCD da Epson. Esses números, sozinhos, não determinam a qualidade da imagem, mas ajudam a contextualizar porque a entrada de luz teve impacto maior neste cenário do que no teste com o JMGO, que possui maior capacidade de brilho.
Diante disso, a projeção ficou consideravelmente mais clara quando comparada à Smart TV da Philips. O conteúdo continuava visível, mas cores e contraste perdiam força à medida que a iluminação natural entrava pelas portas e janelas.
A TV também trabalha em Full HD, mas sua imagem não depende da projeção da luz sobre uma parede, o que ajuda a explicar a vantagem em um ambiente iluminado.
Isso não significa que o projetor se torne inutilizável durante o dia. Em cenas mais claras ou conteúdos com boa luminosidade, ainda foi possível assistir sem grandes problemas. A diferença apareceu principalmente na comparação direta com a televisão, que manteve cores e contraste mais definidos.
Áudio
Se a imagem sentiu mais os efeitos da claridade, o sistema de som foi um dos grandes destaques do Epson EF-61G. O aparelho utiliza um sistema estéreo desenvolvido em parceria com a Bose, integrado ao próprio corpo do projetor.
Na prática, o sistema de áudio entregou boa sensação de imersão durante filmes e outros conteúdos. O resultado chamou atenção especialmente porque portas e janelas permaneceram abertas durante parte do teste e, mesmo assim, o áudio conseguiu preencher bem o ambiente.
Com o espaço mais fechado, a sensação de imersão ficou ainda mais evidente. Entre os pontos avaliados neste cenário, foi no som que o projetor mais se aproximou da experiência oferecida pela televisão.
A Philips também possui suporte a Dolby Atmos, tecnologia voltada à reprodução de áudio mais envolvente. Ainda assim, durante o comparativo, o sistema do Epson se destacou e chegou a proporcionar uma experiência mais imersiva em alguns momentos.
Afinal, projetor 4K substitui a smart TV?
No cenário 4K, o teste mostrou que um projetor mais avançado já consegue chegar bastante perto da experiência oferecida por uma smart TV mesmo em um ambiente claro. O JMGO manteve boa qualidade de imagem com entrada de luz, além de oferecer instalação simples, acesso a aplicativos e um sistema de áudio capaz de dispensar equipamentos externos em boa parte das situações.
Ainda assim, a televisão levou vantagem na imagem. Essa diferença ficou ainda mais evidente no comparativo entre Epson e Philips Full HD, visto que a iluminação teve impacto maior sobre a projeção, mostrando que o desempenho observado com o JMGO não pode ser estendido da mesma forma para qualquer projetor.
Por outro lado, um ambiente que permita fechar cortinas, reduzir a iluminação ou assistir aos conteúdos durante a noite favorece bastante o desempenho do projetor. Nessas situações, a interferência da luz externa tende a ser menor e a possibilidade de obter uma imagem muito maior passa a pesar mais na experiência.
Vale lembrar ainda que os testes foram feitos diretamente na parede e sem ajustes específicos de imagem. Uma tela própria para projeção e configurações adaptadas ao cômodo podem melhorar o resultado.
Por isso, um bom projetor 4K pode assumir o lugar da smart TV em condições favoráveis e entregar uma experiência mais próxima à de cinema. Para quem procura um único aparelho capaz de funcionar bem durante todo o dia, porém, sem precisar controlar tanto a iluminação do ambiente, a smart TV ainda se mostrou a opção mais indicada.
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Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk don’t agree on much. Each started their AI company—Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI, respectively—out of spite at competitors’ greed and recklessness; each is certain that he alone can be entrusted to build superintelligence safely. But in the midst of the AI panic that has seized the country over the past two weeks, the three CEOs found one point of consensus: the introduction of “embedded evaluators,” or outside experts, to sit inside AI companies and monitor their safety practices. Both Amodei and Altman made express commitments to integrating such evaluations inside their companies. Musk followed with a quote-post stating simply, “Dario is right.”
Yet the details of such a system for regulating AI remain vague. How would such a setup work? An unknown number of outside evaluators would be assigned desks to sit at, computers to use, and NDAs to sign. Then, they might seek out risks: Evaluators could spend their days testing whether unreleased models trained for drug discovery can be altered to design viruses too. They might audit organizational practices: Are employees cutting corners on safety in the rush toward the launch of a new model? The evaluators will then write up what they find, and hopefully those reports will see sunlight. Amodei has promised editorial independence, but with significant asterisks: carve-outs for “security-sensitive, legally privileged, commercially sensitive, or third-party confidential information.” Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
As for these experts, it seems likely that they’ll come from small nonprofits, as well as large firms. That includes the tech-consulting giant Accenture, with which Anthropic plans to fund a billion-dollar partnership, and the nonprofit METR, which led the investigation of OpenAI agents’ hack of Hugging Face. After that hack, OpenAI granted METR exclusive access to agent transcripts, data sets, and interviews with OpenAI staff. The resulting report revealed concerning levels of cheating and deception among the agents.
On-site evaluation has precedent in other high-risk industries such as aviation and banking. The FAA delegates some safety certifications to engineering experts inside airplane manufacturers, whereas the Federal Reserve stations its own supervisors inside banks to enforce regulation. “OpenAI and Anthropic are like Citibank: They pose systemic risk to the globe, so you have examiners,” Brad Carson, a former U.S. representative who is now the president of the AI-governance nonprofit Americans for Responsible Innovation, told me.
Yet Amodei’s proposal is still far from a comprehensive AI-auditing regime. As long as safety evaluations remain voluntary, the independent organizations selected by the companies will get as much access as the companies allow to evaluate the specific risks that the companies choose. That doesn’t add up to true independent oversight, and at least some METR employees seem to agree. “None of the work that we’ve done so far passes my bar for an ‘audit’ of an AI company or its systems, and was definitely not ‘regulation’ in any meaningful sense (whether bank examiner–like or otherwise),” Charles Foster, a policy staffer at the organization, wrote on X, speaking in his personal capacity. Recall the Facebook Oversight Board, a legally independent entity created with the ambitious aim to adjudicate the platform’s thorniest speech questions—but which has largely proven powerless to make major decisions that cut against Meta’s interests.
Third-party evaluators must walk the line between holding their corporate hosts accountable and not saying anything that gets them booted from the premises. The same access to Slack channels and lunchroom chatter that helps an evaluator conduct whole-organization safety audits can lead to them succumbing to the same blind spots as their host. Here, the 2008 financial crisis offers hard lessons. A Senate investigation found that the New York Fed’s internal culture had been “excessively deferential,” where supervisors feared speaking up about the issues they were supposedly regulating. Moreover, credit-rating agencies were motivated to offer lenient terms to win business from banks. These conflicts of interest are exaggerated when evaluators—like Accenture—are funded directly by the companies. “It doesn’t really seem tolerable to let AI companies pick providers that they have hundreds of millions of dollars of business with to be the primary cops on the beat,” Nathan Calvin, the general counsel of the AI-advocacy group Encode, told me.
Then there’s the question of whether the evaluators and the companies they’re asked to monitor are too intertwined. METR, a 43-person organization based in Berkeley, has partnered with the leading AI labs to measure model misalignment since 2023. It does not accept payment or donations from AI companies or employees. Still, many METR staffers come from the same circles as the people they audit, and some have known one another socially and professionally for years. “The AI space is not that large,” Jacob Steinhardt, a Berkeley computer-science professor and the CEO of Transluce, a San Francisco–based AI-evaluation nonprofit, told me. “If you say no former lab employee can ever evaluate any AI model, you are ruling out a pretty broad and important set of expertise.” Those longtime relationships have helped small nonprofits gain access to corporate data, yet they now challenge the organizations’ perceived neutrality. “THESE are the people we’re trusting to beat China in AI? Give me a break,” posted House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, quoting a New York Post cover describing METR employees as “The Woke Wizards of A.I.”
Embedded evaluators are surely preferable to the status quo of no oversight at all. The public will learn more about AI incidents when there are watchdogs around—as it has from METR’s Hugging Face report, or Transluce’s recent report on OpenAI agents attempting to hack into a government website. Yet the evaluators will lack teeth and trust until backed by government authority: to license a wide-ranging group of expert organizations, to mandate frontier-AI developers to bring them in, and to set the minimum safety and transparency standards that they must meet. “You need serious oversight,” Gillian Hadfield, a professor of AI governance at Johns Hopkins, told me. “Are we making sure that the entities that are doing this work are qualified? Have we got ways of establishing and maintaining their independence? Do we have a threat that says, ‘If you don’t do this well, you’ll lose your license’?” The worst-case outcome is a race to the bottom: where auditors compete on leniency instead of quality, winning big contracts in return for hasty sign-offs.
Meanwhile, it seems that at least some sort of regulation is approaching. In the face of escalating public backlash, internal employee activism, and fears of near-term AI extinction events, both Anthropic and OpenAI have declared support for various forms of state and federal legislation around third-party audits. In a recent podcast, Ben Horowitz—whose venture firm has been a major voice against AI regulation—also seemed to embrace a private-auditor approach, saying that the government “is very good at setting the rules” around unintended model behaviors, whereas “a very competent private company” should evaluate compliance. The Overton window in Silicon Valley is shifting. But if the stakes really are existential, hiring a few extra inspectors falls painfully short—especially when the details of the arrangements are this slippery.
It all feels too little, and too late. Some politicians, facing an angry and frightened public, have turned to more aggressive asks, such as nuclear-style treaties with China and a ban on superintelligence itself. Two years ago, California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed a state bill that included mandated third-party audits, among other safety requirements, after a fierce lobbying campaign by OpenAI and Andreessen Horowitz. (Anthropic was an exception, expressing conditional support.) Last week, Newsom—sensing the changing tides—issued an executive order to require onsite auditors and accelerate the development of an “AI kill switch.”
President Trump still has his foot on the gas pedal. “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT,” he posted last week. In June, the administration told CAISI, the federal government’s internal AI-evaluation unit, to stop publishing its reports. Trump’s accelerationism—informed by his rapport with ballroom sponsor and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang—likely dooms federal AI-safety regulation for now.
It’s nice to see some AI-industry leaders agreeing that someone else should rein them in. And if implemented well, embedded evaluators are a smart technocratic move. But after years of developing the technology, lobbying against guardrails, and causing multiple accidents, AI leaders shouldn’t be surprised if their preferred—and valid—policy solution ends up being met with disappointment, and a heap of skepticism.
A recent study published inEnvironmental Research reported an association between exposure to electromagnetic radiation in Mexico City — particularly the extremely low frequency magnetic fields (ELF-MF) produced by power lines and household wiring — and children’s risk for developing central nervous system (CNS) tumors.
In short:
Residential exposure to ELF-MF (measured in bedrooms) above 0.4 μT was significantly associated with an increased risk of developing CNS tumors.
Prolonged use of a digital tablet (both with and without internet connection) also increased CNS tumor risk, particularly in children ages 6 - 10.
More than 5% of children in Mexico City were exposed to ELF-MF levels above 0.3 μT, higher than the global average for exposure.
Why this matters:
Everyday exposure to electromagnetic (EMF) radiation — emitted from power lines and electrical grid infrastructure like substations as well as everyday electronics such laptops, tablets and their charging systems — is steadily increasing in the modern world. While the public has some awareness that homes near high voltage powerlines create EMF exposure, fewer are aware that electronics like tablets, laptops, and phones also create EMF exposures in the body, especially when they are charging.
This study adds to the ever-growing body of science pointing to health risks from EMF exposure. The International Agency for Research on Cancer of the World Health Organization classified ELF-EMF magnetic fields as a “possible” human carcinogen in 2001, based largely on evidence linking residential exposure of 0.3 to 0.4 μT to childhood leukemia. More recent studies continue to show the association. Further, Kaiser Permanente studies report that prenatal ELF-EMF exposure was associated with increased miscarriage risk and also ADHD, obesity, and asthma in children. A review found industry-funded studies more often report “no effect.” When this bias is accounted for, strong evidence links EMF magnetic field exposure to adult leukemia, brain, and breast cancer.
What you can do: On an individual level, you can easily reduce your daily exposures:
Relocate beds away from electrical panels
Use tablets and laptops on tables, not on laps
Charge phones and devices outside of the bedroom, not by the bed
Do not use a cell phone while it's charging
Unplug water beds and electric blankets before you get in bed
You can also measure the levels in your home with a basic milligauss meter in order to understand the EMF levels in your home.
Many countries limit ELF-MF exposure in homes and schools due to associations with childhood cancer. The Netherlands, as an example, is buying up homes with elevated levels from powerlines and substations. However, the U.S. has no federal safety limits, as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was defunded from EMF research in the 1990s. From a policy perspective, individuals can contact school boards, planning commissions, and utility regulators to request EMF measurements and advocate for risk mitigation siting policies for new schools, childcare centers, and residential developments.
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Battenberg cake is one of my favourite cakes. But when I tell people that one of the things I like most about this cake is its E-number, they tend to look at me strangely.
It contains the raising agent E541, acidic sodium aluminium phosphate, which is one of the most restricted food additives in the UK. This is due to health concerns about human exposure to aluminium.
According to the UK government regulations, E541 is permitted in almost nothing except “sponge cakes produced from contrasting coloured segments held together by jam or spreading jelly and encased by a flavoured sugar paste”.
The reason for this curious exception is that Battenberg manufacturers managed to persuade the authorities that the additive was essential for achieving the cake’s chequered pattern, and that aluminium exposure from such a niche product wasn’t a health risk.
This level of specificity in the regulations surprises most people, who assume that additives are loosely regulated, casually thrown into food by manufacturers cutting corners. It’s part of a massive counter-movement against additives, driven by fears over ultra-processed foods and a desire for “clean” labels. Though these concerns are understandable, my view of the scientific evidence is that the reality is a little different.
Additives, of course, are compounds used to enhance foods in different ways, but mainly they are about control. When you cook in your home kitchen, the results can be very variable – which is often part of the fun. No-one expects two homemade cakes to look or taste the same, while breads out of your kitchen oven can be very different if you make them from different batches of flour.
For commercial foods, it’s a different story: industrial production relies on predictability, while consumers expect consistency. Few of us would be happy if supermarket breads, biscuits or burgers varied from batch to batch. So commercial foods are usually standardised — and additives help to achieve that.
Welcome to our series exploring the cutting edge of food science. From the latest advances in meat alternatives to weird and wonderful new additives, science is transforming what we eat like never before. This series will bring you up to speed on all the latest and give you plenty of, er, food for thought.
Their number one role is preservation: extending shelf life, making it possible to produce foods further away, and often making them more affordable in the process.
Propionic acid (E280) stops bread from going stale and mouldy. Antioxidants like vitamin C (E300, aka ascorbic acid) and vitamin E (E306/tocopherol) prevent fats from oxidising and going rancid. Emulsifiers stabilise products such as mayonnaise which would otherwise quickly separate.
Creating a specific texture and flavour is also very important. Thickeners improve the creaminess of yoghurts and some cheeses. Emulsifiers also help to make ice-cream smooth and chocolate soft. Citric acid (E330) can help zing up a salad dressing, while also dialling down the earthiness in some plant-based milks.
Another use of additives is to overcome the problem of raw products of different quality. Wheat from a wet, cold year can behave very differently from the same variety in a dry, hot year. This can mean differences in protein content and gluten formation during baking, which can affect how much breads rise, for instance.
Ascorbic acid and synthetic fats (mono and diglycerides of fatty acids (E471) can compensate for this and ensure the quality of bread is consistent. Likewise, adding E500 (bicarbonate of soda) and E336 (cream of tartar) – in other words, baking powder – ensures cakes and muffins are light and fluffy.
In the same way, jam depends on the pectin content of fruits, which is affected by factors that can’t be controlled – extra sunlight during growing reduces it, for instance. So manufacturers add pectin (E440) during jam-making to ensure it gels properly.
Or take meat, whose water retention can be improved by adding phosphates like E451. This ensures that natural fluids don’t leak out in the supermarket chiller section (phosphates are also more dubiously used by some meat producers to enable them to add water to cheaper cuts so that they look more attractive to consumers). As for milk products, you can avoid the risk of separation by adding carrageenan (E407), a seaweed gum, which strengthens their protein network.
Indeed, whole product categories would barely exist without certain additives. Many low-fat spreads rely on gelling agents to mimic the texture of butter. Without sweeteners, there would be a much smaller selection of low calorie and low sugar foods.
Very little of this is about deceiving consumers — and it should not be. The need to ensure the consistent quality of produce using additives is probably much greater than most people realise.
The remarkably long history of additives
While we’ve only referred to them as additives for about a century, these compounds have been around a great deal longer. Findings from the Qesem Cave in Israel suggest ash was being used to preserve foods as much as 200,000 years ago.
In times when the food supply has been unreliable, meaning most of our history, preserving food was essential to human survival. Entire empires have been built on the trade of another vital preservative, salt, to be used either as brine for pickling or as crystals/powder for drying.
Nitrates (E251) and nitrites (E250) have also been used as additives for many hundreds of years. In Roman times they were used as a constituent of rock salt, both for preserving meat and to keep it nice and pink. With a little more chemical know-how, these compounds are still used today.
Another preservative in use since Roman times is sulphur dioxide (E220), both for wine and foods such as fruits. The Romans obtained it by mining brimstone and heating it into a liquid that could be made into sulphur candles. These could then be burned to produce sulphur dioxide gas in the presence of whatever was being preserved.
The Romans also used additives to make dull, bland food more palatable. Garum — the ubiquitous Roman fish sauce – provided salty and umami flavours by fermenting fish guts. Lead acetates, obtained from boiling grape juice in leaden pots and kettles, were used as a non-calorific sweetener – in wine, for example. It wasn’t until many centuries later that it was proven that this additive was poisonous.
Towards the end of the 18th century, we developed a better understanding of how additives work thanks to advances in food chemistry. It also became possible to extract these compounds in a laboratory, such as lecithin from egg yolk to be used as an emulsifier, pectin from apples, and agar, another gelling agent, from seaweed.
A few decades later, chemists started synthesising additives, which often proved cheaper and easier than obtaining them naturally. Salt of hartshorn – also known as Baker’s ammonia (E503) – could be made by heating ammonium sulphate obtained from soot in combination with limestone (calcium carbonate).
Previously extracted from deer antlers, this was used as a raising agent and preservative for things like digestive biscuits and lebkuchen, a German gingerbread. Much like making aspirin in a laboratory instead of extracting it from willow bark, or digoxin instead of foxglove tea (for heart problems), synthetic and purified additives allowed much better control over their use.
Scientists’ better understanding of chemical and physical mechanisms in the 19th century also allowed new additives to be developed to suit the food industry and consumer demand. These included dyes like aniline purple and martius yellow, both obtained from coal tar, and new flavours like amyl acetate, a byproduct from fermenting alcohol, which gives a sense of pear or banana. These were unveiled at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 for the first time.
Artificial pear and banana sweets were unveiled at London’s Great Exhibition in 1851.Wikimedia
Other additives allowed the use of cheaper ingredients or extended shelf lives. Borax, also known as sodium borate, was harvested from lake beds starting in the late 19th century and added to sub-standard milk and butter to mask sour tastes and kill bacteria.
Additives also began to allow the development of new products that could be used as cheap alternatives, such as margarine. Though originally made from beef fat and skimmed milk in the 1870s, it became vegetarian around the turn of the century after chemists worked out how to make food oils solidify by forcing hydrogen into them at high temperatures (known as hydrogenation).
Margarine solved one problem – the affordability of butter – but food scientists realised a few years later that it created another: it lacks the vitamins naturally found in dairy. So from the 1920s onwards, manufacturers also started fortifying it with vitamins, as well as making it more attractive by incorporating emulsifiers, flavours and colours.
Elsewhere, the use of additives has put consumers at risk, often due to unscrupulous characters. They made bread whiter with chalk, for instance, at a time when many people were already suffering from malnutrition. They sweetened wine with lead salt long after it was known to be toxic. There have even been cases in more recent times of wine being sweetened with anti-freeze.
One other notorious case was the Bradford sweets poisoning of 1858. At the time, sugar was very expensive due to high taxes, so confectionery manufacturers would mix it with plaster of Paris to keep costs down. In the Bradford case, an apprentice muddled up plaster of Paris and arsenic, which led to around 20 people being killed from eating toxic peppermint lozenges.
The modern era
The 20th century brought massive changes to the food system: a rapidly growing population needed to be fed, scientific advances provided a better understanding of food processing, and the rise of synthetic chemistry made hundreds of new compounds available. The upheaval of two world wars accelerated these processes as new products such as canned meats, sliced cheeses and even packets of crisps were all made possible by additives.
The same goes for British sliced bread. The Chorleywood process, named after the village near London where it was invented in 1961, revolutionised production of the daily loaf. By adding lard, ascorbic acid and extra yeast to dough, then mixing it at high speeds, there was no more need to wait hours for the mixture to rise.
This allowed the mass production of bread, which was extremely helpful in meeting ever growing demand. It also allowed the use of British-grown flour, which often has a lower protein content, meaning its dough traditionally didn’t rise as well. In subsequent years, other additives have also become common ingredients in this mass-produced bread, including E471 (mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids) as emulsifiers to improve dough handling and E282 (calcium propionate) as a preservative to enhance shelf life.
The post-war decades saw dramatic societal changes: rising incomes, longer working hours, and more women entering the workforce. These all created demand for foods that saved time and preparation. Ready meals, packet soups, instant desserts and salad dressings all reached supermarket shelves for the first time. This wouldn’t have been possible without emulsifiers, stabilisers, gelling agents and preservatives – even if such details were quietly hidden on labels that often sought to make these products look as traditional as possible.
At the same time, synthetic coal-tar dyes made sweets vivid and soft drinks luminous. Artificial flavours like strawberry, banana, pineapple, sometimes not tasting remotely natural, could be added to almost anything at negligible cost. And artificial sweeteners made it possible to indulge without sin … or at least calories.
For several decades between the 1950s and 1970s, all these new products were seen as unambiguous progress. At a time when science was enabling everything from tower blocks to rocket ships to the pill, it made perfect sense that it was doing the same for our eating habits.
The backlash
The enthusiasm for this modern food was short lived. In 1973, Californian allergist Benjamin Feingold suggested that additives – in particular artificial dyes and flavourings – were responsible for hyperactivity in children. His book, Why Your Child is Hyperactive, became a bestseller. The so-called Feingold diet became popular among parents, eliminating artificial colours, flavours and other additives.
In Britain, Maurice Hanssen’s E for Additives (1984) was another major blow to this industry when it became a bestseller in the 1980s. It detailed the purpose and health risks of all the E-numbers, which were devised as a European mark of safety, so that only additives considered safe were allocated one. Now they became culturally inverted into a warning sign.
The case against additives wasn’t quite what many began to believe, however. There was little proof that Feingold’s diet could reduce hyperactivity, even after extensive research. This may have been because of the strong genetic component in the condition.
In 2007 the UK’s Food Standards Agency commissioned a research study to investigate the effect of some artificial food colourings on hyperactivity. Children in the study showed some increase in hyperactivity from consuming the compounds in question – tartrazine (E102), sunset yellow (E110), quinoline yellow (E104), carmoisine (E122), ponceau 4R (E124) and allura red (E129).
Yet the European Food Safety Authority decided there was sufficient uncertainty that there was no need to change the permitted use of these additives. Instead European lawmakers mandated that foods containing them carry the warning “may have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children”, which applies today in the UK and across the continent.
In parallel, the additives industry has tried to adapt to consumers’ concerns about the things that go into foods. For the past several decades, we have seen a plethora of products which claim to be free from “artificial colours and flavours” – and sometimes even “free from chemicals” (although that is impossible).
Much of this “clean-label” movement has been about replacing E-numbers with ingredients that sound more natural, though in many cases the manufacturers just replace additives with plant extracts that contain the same compounds.
Acerola extract contains vitamin C, for instance, but sounds better than E300. Seaweed extract sounds much more natural than E407 (carrageenan) and turmeric extract better than E100 (curcumin). Similarly, vegetable salts or celery extract in processed meat replace nitrite (E250). The nitrite in these compounds will still act — turning the meat more pink and killing bacteria – but the consumer is not always aware that this additive is even present.
In the EU and UK, whether something counts as an additive legally depends on what it does, not where it comes from. However, this often depends on interpretation. Acerola cherry extract, for example, is almost always added for its vitamin C content, which acts as an antioxidant. However, it usually appears on the label as a fruit ingredient rather than as ascorbic acid (E300). Clean labelling probably employs as many lawyers as food scientists.
One example of how this plays out is Naked Bacon, made by Northern Irish company Finnebrogue. The goal was to remove nitrite from bacon to make it healthier – not just create a nicer label. As an alternative to nitrite and nitrate, they used a proprietary fruit and spice extract called Natpre made by Spanish manufacturer Prosur. This was initially marketed as free from E-numbers. The Food Standards Agency, however, took the view that the ascorbic acid (vitamin C) in the mix was an additive that had to be declared. After a lengthy dispute the company agreed in 2018 to list “antioxidant: ascorbic acid” on the label. The remainder of the extract is still declared as “natural flavouring”.
As well as these kinds of uncertainties, there’s also a potential problem with plant extracts as alternatives to existing additives: a rigorously tested compound is being replaced by something less understood, and still potentially harmful, in the name of a cleaner label. They can contain natural toxins, for instance, while the levels of the additive can vary by batch.
The case for additives
Another part of the stigma against additives is that they enable industrially produced food, which has come to be seen by many as inherently unhealthy. This was abetted by the likes of US journalist Michael Pollan’s bestseller, In Defense of Food (2008), the documentary Food Inc (2008) and TV chefs like Jamie Oliver.
This mindset probably partly derives from all those unsavoury practices I mentioned in the early food industry, where chemicals were used to disguise spoilage, extend products or improve appearance.
Wrapped up in this is a romanticism of natural food, viewing chemical intervention with suspicion. Many people still see natural as better and healthier, though there is actually little evidence for this claim.
Whether industrially produced food is unhealthy depends very much on what is in the food. Foods high in fat, salt and sugar increase the risk of chronic disease, whether it is a home-baked cake or an industrially manufactured cookie. Sure enough, a recent study found no difference in health outcomes between processed and non-processed foods that meet current dietary guidelines.
With today’s focus on ultra-processed foods, it is true that certain industrial additives like emulsifiers and artificial colours and flavours are sometimes used as evidence that a product falls into this category. But the health impact of these foods is more tied to issues like high calorie-density and low fibre content than the toxicity of individual ingredients, so the additives are rarely the primary culprits.
It’s also worth emphasising that without additives, natural food can spoil much more quickly. Almost 20% of foods are lost to spoilage in retail, and more than 30 million years of healthy lives are lost every year to food-borne diseases. Without additives, this situation would be much worse. And at a time when the cost of living is such a burden for so many people, it’s hard to deny that additives make food much more affordable.
Regulatory issues
Unlike with pharmaceuticals, there is no formal system for checking whether additives are causing harm after they start being used in food manufacturing. Regulators rely on the scientific literature to keep them up to date on any risks, as well as commissioning research studies if there are reasons for concern.
The situation isn’t helped by the different classification frameworks that exist. A recent example is aspartame. In 2023 the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified this sweetener as possibly carcinogenic to humans, causing a huge amount of concern.
Yet at the same time Jecfa, the Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives, whose pronouncements influence food regulation around the world, reaffirmed aspartame’s accepted daily intake of 40mg per kg of body weight. It concluded that there was no convincing evidence of adverse effects at current consumption levels.
This sounds contradictory, but actually the IARC and Jecfa ask very different questions. The IARC asks about hazard: could this substance possibly cause cancer? Jecfa asks about risk: could this substance possibly cause cancer at the amount people eat? Both can be right. A substance can probably cause cancer, only not at the amounts people generally consume.
The IARC, for instance, classes the Sun as a group 1 carcinogen, meaning it’s known to cause cancer in humans. Yet we still recommend sun exposure so that our bodies produce vitamin D. We manage the risk by reducing exposure — either by looking for shade or using sunscreen. As for aspartame, it’s worth noting that the IARC classification put it in the same category as aloe vera and pickled vegetables.
Emulsifiers are another additive currently receiving a lot of attention. Some studies have shown that they can alter the human gut microbiome and disrupt the intestinal barrier. Whether this causes harm is obviously an important question, but there’s much that isn’t yet clear: we don’t know if these effects are harmful, or whether they’re transient or lasting.
The trouble is that changes in the gut microbiome are difficult to interpret. It can change in response to all sorts of alterations to someone’s diet, and while there is some good data on links between the microbiome and health, we do not yet have a clear framework for interpreting what specific changes mean.
To be clear, change in itself isn’t a negative: fermented foods and prebiotics are recommended especially for their ability to change the gut microbiome. Regulators in the UK and elsewhere are actively investigating how to incorporate microbiome data into safety assessments, but the science is not yet at a stage where firm conclusions can be drawn.
It might still seem appealing to ban emulsifiers in the meantime as a precaution, but that might have consequences that eclipse the intended benefits. For example they could be replaced by natural lecithins from sources like egg yolks and sunflower seeds, but these are much more expensive. The consumer would bear the brunt – and there is no evidence that these alternatives are better.
There is also a question of consumer choice. Provided a food is safe to consume within established guidelines, there is a strong argument that individuals should be free to make their own choices, rather than having them imposed on the basis of uncertain evidence.
Alcohol, for instance, is another product categorised by the IARC as a group 1 carcinogen, and there is overwhelming evidence that drinking it can harm your health in numerous other ways. Yet while there are regular calls for tighter regulation of additives with a much better risk profile, calls for a ban on champagne or claret are much rarer.
This isn’t to say that the need for proportionality should always justify inaction. Regulatory agencies should and do act to protect consumers when the evidence warrants it. In 2007 data emerged that red 2G (E128), used as a colouring in sausages and burgers, was potentially carcinogenic and toxic to people’s genes. This was rightly considered serious enough that it was swiftly withdrawn in Europe and elsewhere.
The future of additives
One current area of rapid development has been plant-based foods, where achieving the texture, appearance and mouthfeel of meat and dairy requires a specific set of additives. For example, to produce plant-free dairy products that melt and taste like the real thing, food scientists add synthetic wheys and caseins made using a technique called precision fermentation. This involves inserting synthetic copies of dairy DNA into yeasts or fungi.
The first large-scale application of precision fermentation was actually in medicine in the early 1980s, producing insulin using genetically modified E. coli. The food industry got onboard in the early 1990s, with chymosin, an enzyme essential for cheesemaking to separate the curds and whey. It became the first major precision-fermentation product, and is now used in many milk-based cheeses instead of traditional rennet from calves’ stomachs, producing more consistent results and also vegetarian products into the bargain.
In the last couple of years, companies are now offering the entire suite of dairy proteins including whey, casein and lactoglobulins made in a fermentor as opposed to a cow. This is enabling products that are bio-identical to dairy rather than just plant-based alternatives, such as Bored Cow milk in the US. The line between additives and food itself is also increasingly blurring as different companies and research groups compete not just to produce individual proteins but entire muscle tissue in fermentation tanks.
Meanwhile, AI is somewhat inevitably being leveraged to help drive additives forward. One promising line of enquiry is discovering compounds that can fool human receptors into thinking they’re consuming salt or sugar that isn’t really there, or mask other tastes such as bitterness.
Also promising is a technique called nano-encapsulation, which raises the prospect of wrapping additives in microscopic biopolymers or bubbles of lipid (fat) to prevent them from spoiling. This could prevent colours from fading on supermarket shelves, or vitamins from being damaged by heat, for instance.
Whatever you think of these developments, food additives will probably be around for as long as humans need to consume food that is not freshly prepared. They are neither inherently good nor inherently bad, just tools that can be used to make food safer, more affordable and longer lasting.
Next time you enjoy a slice of Battenberg cake, indulge me by sparing a thought for E541 — and for the system that decided exactly where it could be eaten.
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Gunter Kuhnle has received research funding from Mars, Inc., a company engaged in flavanol research and flavanol-related commercial activities. As a previous member of the EFSA ANS panel and the Committee on Toxicity (FSA), he was involved in the evaluation of food additives. He is currently a member of ACNFP. Gunter also had discussions with Finnebrogue ahead of the release of their Naked Bacon product. He has no financial interest in either Finnebrogue or Mars. The views expressed are his own.
After only a few months on the market, Meta’s new AI-integrated smart glasses are already being exploited for nefarious purposes.
Dubbed “pervert glasses” for their incognito ability to film anybody in public, the new specs have enabled voyeurs and content creeps the world over, leading to widespread harassment, bullying, and privacy violations.
And now the pervert glasses are also feeding another grim genre of content: joybait.
You may have heard of ragebait, which is online content deliberately designed to piss people off, therefore driving clicks and views. Joybait is ragebait’s seemingly innocent twin: content designed to stir up those warm fuzzies and make you smile.
A now-viral clip uploaded by public prank content creator Levese shows that a user of Meta’s AI glasses shows how the scheme unfolds. The video, first spotted by journalist James Vincent, shows Levese catch a glimpse of the author Travis Schick as he shops with his partner in a Walmart.
Crucially, Levese doesn’t approach Schick right away, but rather uses his phone to snap a photo of Schick’s face, which he then searches using a facial recognition site. After the service uncovers Schick’s social media accounts — revealing the random man as an aspiring novelist — Levese makes his approach, recording with his Meta glasses as he catches the unassuming writer off guard.
“Wait, Travis?” Levese asks as Schick tries to check out. “You wrote the book ‘The Readhead?'”
“Yeah?” the confused writer confirms.
“No way I love that book man! Yo I love that book bro,” Levese replies disingenuously. “It was a really good novel.”
“Yeah that was me,” Schick says, trying to contain a smile.
As positive as the interaction seems on its surface, it’s all based on a false premise constructed through use of facial recognition software, without which Levese never would have known who Travis Schick actually was. Of course, Schick himself is ancillary to the entire scheme, which was really about making some content — joybait — for Levese to post to his 225,000 TikTok followers.
And as content, the stunt was wildly successful. The reel has over 60 million views and 30,000 comments on Levese’s TikTok page alone, and has become easy fodder for content farms on every social media feed you can think of.
On uncovering the clip, the journalist James Vincent remarked that it embodies “individualized surveillance culture posing as feelgood content.”
Falling for the original premise of the bait, some excused the privacy violation, arguing the exposure is boosting Schick’s work.
Sure enough, comments under Schick’s novel “The Redhead” on the creative platform Quotev are flooding in by the hundreds, full of well wishers and supporters who otherwise never would have found his work. Schick’s TikTok page has likewise exploded, going from around 150 followers to well over 12,700 in just a few short days.
But Schick’s viral moment is beside the point, as Vincent observes: “there may be positive outcomes from this one video (which stem from its novelty as short form content) — but the larger effect is creating a society where we monetize kindness, exploit the goodwill of strangers, and destroy the right to privacy in public,” he wrote in a comment on X-formerly-Twitter.
And the aspiring novelist is far from alone. Levese has dozens of videos following the exact same format, each with millions of views. For his part, the content creator is well aware that he’s crossing a line. The first one, in which the content creator stalks a man buying bananas, prominently features pinned text reading “day 1: stealing people’s digital footprint.”
“This app is dangrous [sic],” Levese wrote in the video caption.
In response to a new European Union law, AI platforms are implementing new schemes for watermarking the content they generate. Anthropic recently disclosed its future Claude models will use SynthID-Text, an approach Google created and released as open source. It uses a secret key that subtly changes the process a model uses for choosing the next word in a sentence. Whereas a top next word choice might be “cloudy,” the key might change it to “overcast.” Anyone who knows the key can determine if it was generated by the platform using it.
New research shows that SynthID-Text can change not just word selection but also the tools a model invokes and the chances it will adhere to or disregard safety guardrails it has been trained to follow. The threat can become greater in the face of an adversarial prompt, in which an attacker attempts to cause a model to carry out a harmful action, such as revealing a password or other sensitive information. Instructions that normally wouldn’t be followed will, in some cases, be performed once the watermarking is deployed. The finding underscores the need for developers to thoroughly test how their LLMs and agents behave when watermarking is in place.
Changing safety behavior
“As compared to the same models without watermarking, it is definitely going to change their behavior, especially when we place it under adversarial conditions, or we make these models call tools when they’re powering an agent,” Andrea Siposova, an AI security researcher at Lasso Security, told Ars. “Watermarking is made to not be perceptible to a reader, but we know that when we are changing anything about what the model is generating, it is going to cause some tradeoffs, it’s going to show up somewhere.”
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.
The International Meteor Organization, the nonprofit that coordinates and publishes amateur and professional observations of meteor phenomena, said its infrastructure has suffered a “critical blow” from a cyberattack.
“We recently suffered a cyberattack that dealt a critical blow to aging infrastructure, taking much of our site offline," a static page on its website on Wednesday said. “We expect several weeks of partial downtime as we transition to new infrastructure and services.”
“I am very sad to see the site down”
In the meantime, the IMO said it’s prioritizing the reporting of fireball observations, which can be reported here. The organization is also providing some information on its Facebook page.
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