Advertising agency zombifies TUAW with artificial intelligence ( AI ) copy andamp; recycled keywords in a stupid SEO play.

The Unofficial Apple Weblog
Last updated 5 hours agoThe unofficial Apple Weblog has returned, but the ad agency Web Orange turned it into an AI-generated plagiarism farm, with stolen bylines and worse, copy that was generated using AI. There was a website for almost everything after the dot-com boom in 2000. The internet was still relatively small compared to the corporate-driven market of today. Some websites were created by larger finance groups like Weblogs, backed in 2003 by Mark Cuban. The Unofficial Apple Weblog, or TUAW, was launched in 2004 under Weblogs Inc. and was one of their most popular properties. Web Orange, an ad agency, recently purchased the rotting corpse of TUAW, minus its archived content. Then, they scraped content from other sites. The AI scraper and other Apple-centric websites have stolen some of our verbatim phrases and clear hallucinations. That’s pretty bad. But it gets worse. Many of the great technology reporters today got their start with TUAW, and they still work hard to this day in the industry. Christina Warren and Scott McNulty are two examples. TUAW veterans have worked for us from time to time. You might recognize this name. This is not AppleInsider William Gallagher. Now, Hong Kong-based Web Orange, which purchased the TUAW domain, is using both their names — as well as our own William Gallagher — to attach AI-summarized contents in a sick SEO game. Bylines are filled with familiar name, but their bios and photos are AI-generated. This travesty website might have been able to benefit from the SEO strength of these writer’s names if Google hadn’t already ruined SEO through its own AI play. It’s not just Google that is responsible for this. We hate what Web Orange did to an once-great website. Weblogs Inc. had a number blogs that you may be familiar with, such as Engadget Autoblog and TUAW. These smaller blogs were sold to Verizon in 2006 after being purchased by AOL. Since 2005, the web media landscape has changed dramatically. Many Apple enthusiast websites have closed or had to change financial strategies. If abused, the empty domains, which are often owned by larger companies, can be SEO goldmines. AppleInsider survived the turmoil of the past 27 years. We’d be horrified if our bylines and website were used in a future where we no longer existed. We are horrified that our staff, some of whom came from MacNN, would be replaced by AI bylines. We can’t do much about the AI rewriting content hosted elsewhere or zombification on TUAW. All we can do to point it out. Do what we do. Find out who is behind your favorite works and support them. Don’t support the disgusting attempt to steal journalistic integrity, content and identities of others using AI grift. The TUAW’s about us page states that “our mission is to continue to provide Apple enthusiasts and technology professionals with authoritative and engaging contents.” The relaunched site is so far from the promise that it could be at the edge of the solar systems. Maybe they will recover. We doubt it, however, given how they re-started an old and trusted property.