Apple blog TUAW returns as an AI content farm

(Christina Warren here) From what I can glean, it looks like they took a dump of the site from Archive.org and got a lot of the blog slugs, kept the headlines (or made very superficial changes), assigned a random writer name to those stories and then told AI to rewrite the prose. Except it was super sloppy and some posts would just end abruptly. My assumption is that they might have only had partial feeds or a certain number of characters that they were grabbing per post. 404 Media has some examples (https://www.404media.co/a-beloved-tech-blog-tuaw-is-now-publ...) in their article about this. Regardless, the scheme seems to be to try to get some sort of domain authority, fill a site with archives and then hope that they can profit somehow using stuffed affiliate links and putting ads all over the site. I don’t think many of these tactics even work anymore, given Google's changes around this sort of thing, but I just assume that this was the angle and that the entity that bought the site (who did something similar to iLounge back in 2019), got it very cheap and was able to put this WordPress-based monstrosity together pretty quickly.

The good news for all of us who worked at TUAW is that the bad publicity coupled with the terse email I sent the site owner earlier today (where I had to pull the “don’t make me get my lawyer involved” card, even tho the legalities of this are tricky and enforcement would be extremely difficult), meant that they changed the bylines at least. I'm not happy that old urls to stories I wrote will now once again work, but take people to AI-generated slop instead, but honestly, I’ll take it. Yahoo might still own the content (but it also might belong to the writers, I’d have to check my contract from 2007, assuming I still have it), in which case, they would have much better resources for going after these people, but speaking only for myself, my concern was making sure my name wasn’t attached to things I didn’t write — especially new content — even putting the money it would cost aside, I simply don't have enough time to try to stop any copyright infringement.

I’m immensely grateful to Engadget, 404 Media, Six Colors, AppleInsider, and others who publicized this. When John Gruber texted me this morning with the link to a website that died a decade ago, my initial reaction was a swift “wtf” and I’m chuffed that we got this result as quickly as we did.