Apple Blog TUAW Returns With Stolen Graphics and AI-Generated Content

[Haiku_Oezu]

What an absolute disgrace
I was never the biggest fan of TUAW for a multitude of reasons but I always kept them on my feed

To see it come back as a reanimated corpse is just ghastly

 

[JitteryJimmy]

On the positive side, the writing is better than the articles found on 9to5mac.

 

[tny]

Can Macrumors block bots by doing a robots.txt file to the site? This looks bad.

robots.txt doesn't block malicious bots; it's simply a request that is honored by legitimate crawlers.

Oops, see someone beat me to this.

I'll also mention that you can use a service like CloudFlare to block crawlers it identifies, to block specific IP addresses, and even whole networks (these are all things that can be accomplished through web server configration as well, but CloudFlare's interface makes it much easier).

 

[Andreas from Zurich]

Wonder how long it will take till a rephrased version of this article pops up on their site…

 

[richie510]

It is quite funny to read the "Authors at TUAW" page. Every single blurb (except for the first one) starts with "<name> is a dedicated writer". It appears that ever other author has a "keen eye for detail" while the other half "bring a wealth of knowledge...".

 

[stinksroundhere]

Who needs AI fake news when you can have the real thing

 

[Jumpthesnark]

But in the end what are news platforms doing except rewriting what someone else said?

If that's where you're getting your news, as opposed to sites/publications that do original reporting, then that's a you problem. Find better sources of news, and support them.

 

[krull1015]

Don’t you all copy each other, really? How do you know it is Ai?

It seems they do, no originality, every tech blog and YouTuber seem to follow the same script or variant of it. Same information being recycled over and over and over …. It’s getting painfully boring 🥱

 

[kidTruant]

Man, I used to really love that site. Read it every day. What a terrible way to treat what was once a really good site.

 

[ignatius345]

Considering I haven't been a fan of MacRumors for years, I wouldn't mind TUAW's website if it means less ads and pointless forum/comment moderation.

"Not a fan" and yet you still take time to post here and make sure we all know.

 

[krull1015]

The original TUAW was great so I was happy to see a fresh restart when new articles suddenly turned up in my rss-feed. Entered the site and it felt strange to say the least. Google has to take some sort of action going forward (don't do evil).

Don’t you find it odd to expect a huge tech company who’s constantly under scrutiny for unethical behavior to be the enforcer of ethical behavior…. 🤷

 

[decafjava]

Damn, iLounge too? I used to frequent that side about the time I joined Macrumors and the forum was quite fun at the time. Learned tips there as well.

 

[krull1015]

Through all genres, “content creators” are just regurgitating an original press release or something someone has already covered but in a different spin. And then there are reviewers….who most don’t dare say anything critical because they’ll lose their chance to review the next thing.

I’m not condoning scraping and I feel bad for MR but it is the future. I won’t sugarcoat it, it was nice seeing TUAW’s site today to just get the articles with some quick facts and not have to scroll through advertisements or read through fluff because you need to hold the viewers attention to get paid.

Once again, not condoning it, it’s just what is going to be done with current and future tech.

Yeo, unfortunately it’s the future of an AI generated internet. Are we certain we want to embrace AI?

“If it can be used for evil, it will be”

 

[krull1015]

Use this experience to your advantage, be the catalyst for change and future regulations governing AI.

Sorry to see this happen to MR because it’s essentially theft. A glimpse into the future of a world without proper regulations and technological safeguards against AI.

 

[jaemes]

If you've been following Apple news and rumors for the last decade, you might remember The Unofficial Apple Weblog, or TUAW. TUAW was shut down and the site was folded into Engadget way back in 2015, but this month, a zombie TUAW website reappeared.

As it turns out, the TUAW domain name was purchased by a Hong Kong-based advertising agency, and it now hosts stolen content rewritten using AI. TUAW started posting AI-generated content earlier this week, with all of it stolen from sites like MacRumors and 9to5Mac.

The new TUAW website takes articles from Apple news sites and runs them through AI to change the wording. There are multiple stolen images that have been lifted from MacRumors for these articles, with the graphics used created by our in-house graphic designer. Shortly after we published an iPhone 17 "Slim" overview, for example, TUAW published an almost identical article that uses our stolen imagery and reads like it was run through a thesaurus.

The company that bought TUAW also shamelessly used the names of people who worked at the site many years ago for author bylines, which meant this stolen content looked like it was coming from people like Christina Warren and Brett Terpstra.

Warren was able to get her name and the names of other prominent writers removed after publicizing the zombie site on Mastodon, but the AI content remains. TUAW changed the Christina Warren byline on its site to Mary Brown, making other similar generic name changes. There are no actual writers at TUAW, just AI-generated images and biographies to go along with the AI content.

The advertising agency that purchased the TUAW domain name (Web Orange Limited) did not purchase any TUAW content, but went back and generated AI-rewritten versions of archived TUAW articles from archive.org. Thousands of these articles are on the site alongside newly generated AI stories.

It is worth noting that the company that bought the TUAW domain name also purchased the iLounge domain name several years ago and resurrected that site with low-quality content.

TidBITS, The Verge, Engadget, 404Media, and other sites have done deep dives into TUAW and the company behind it that are worth checking out. TUAW's owner does not appear to be based in the United States, and it's unclear if TUAW will be taken down even with legal complaints.

Readers of MacRumors, 9to5Mac, and other tech sites will want to avoid TUAW going forward. As TidBITS points out, Google is a major factor in what's going on with TUAW because it isn't de-incentivizing AI-generated content, even on a site where it's almost all AI content. TUAW articles are showing up on the first page of search results alongside legitimate tech sites.

Article Link: Apple Blog TUAW Returns With Stolen Graphics and AI-Generated Content

This is just the beginning. Writing will have no value in the future.

 

[Chazz12]

That’s a bummer but when you think about how lots of websites operate they use press releases and rewrite them.
Not cool either way 🥹

That's literally what we were taught to do in my communication studies and writing for the media classes. You take the press releases from companies or whoever, and you write your news article with that as a source. It's just like writing a research paper. So yes, that is how website/news orgs operate, but that is NOT What is happening here with TUAW. They are taking already written articles and changing sentence structure line by line. Exactly what we were taught not to do, even in Jr High.

 

[NightFox]

Can Macrumors block bots by doing a robots.txt file to the site? This looks bad.

Robots.txt stopped being effective for stuff like this about 25 years ago, and even then it was passive.

 

[hauntvictim]

Makes you wonder what the internet will be like years from now

Hong Kong based company? Makes you wonder why the U.S. continues to cozy up to the Chinese.

 

[Mousse]

Don’t you all copy each other, really? How do you know it is Ai?

Well, I've received spam email about events happening in Unused York. Something tells me it was written by AI.

 

[hans1972]

Well, I've received spam email about events happening in Unused York. Something tells me it was written by AI.

That's the best name for Nieuw Amsterdam yet.

 

[Shirasaki]

Lots of folks in this thread seem to be upset about the future AI is ushering in, but probably don't realize that the entire way the industry/enthusiast community is thinking about AI is wrong. Read this: https://disconnect.blog/generative-ai-closes-off-a-better/

This is a nice read. And the opinion resonates some of my personal criticisms towards the current society as a whole. It’s a chill vision Of the future tech companies trying so hard to want us to believe.

 

[jjwwqq]

A sign of what is to come.

 

[Jumpthesnark]

That's literally what we were taught to do in my communication studies and writing for the media classes. You take the press releases from companies or whoever, and you write your news article with that as a source. It's just like writing a research paper. So yes, that is how website/news orgs operate, but that is NOT What is happening here with TUAW. They are taking already written articles and changing sentence structure line by line. Exactly what we were taught not to do, even in Jr High.

Wow, that's a pretty terrible way to teach people.

I studied journalism and we were taught exactly the opposite. A press release is source material only to the degree that it can alert you to a story so you can do original reporting, and it can help prepare a reporter with an understanding of the story so they can then ask questions of primary sources. If an organization wouldn't provide someone to elaborate beyond saying "it's in the press release," then the story just got smaller. And if the story were interesting enough, a good reporter would look for sources who would speak off the record.

Anything written from a press release alone would be considered a one-source story, and they are looked at very dubiously in most newsrooms. Said story would hopefully make it very clear to the reader that the organization would not comment beyond the press release, so readers could determine the value of the information for themselves.

 

[icanhazmac]

Considering I haven't been a fan of MacRumors for years, I wouldn't mind TUAW's website if it means less ads and pointless forum/comment moderation.

You haven't even been here for "years", lulz! Unless of course you lurked on a site you didn't like for years and then decided to join the site you haven't liked for years only to then complain about how you don't like said site.

#headache

 

[roar08]

The internet will become an infinite cycle of AI ingestion and regurgitation. A forever cycle, in which data is sucked up and spat out multiple times… so much so that what you end up looking at will bear no resemblance to the original in any way.

I actually wonder about this. It does seem like this or a close variant of it is going to be a significant issue. I wonder if people will contribute less to the creation of information as they rely more and more on AI generated content, thus accelerating the problem.