The AI Content Empire Built on Fake Writers and Broken Promises

In September 2024, an Australian entrepreneur named Justin Brown posted a YouTube video warning that writers should be “scared right now” about artificial intelligence. Filmed as he hiked through a national park, Brown mused that AI would inevitably take many people’s jobs, “including writers.” What he failed to mention was that his own company, Brown Brothers Media (BBM), which he runs with his brothers Lachlan and Brendan, had just months earlier fired a stunning proportion of its own writers as it embraced the very technology he was warning about. BBM had pioneered a remarkably cynical business model: it buys established online publications with loyal audiences—space news sites, parenting advice hubs, vegan magazines, tech blogs—then floods them with dizzying torrents of AI-generated content, thousands of articles per month, designed to soak up as many readers as possible through Google search and Discover. The strategy proved extraordinarily successful. By 2025, BBM boasted that its network surpassed 50 million page views monthly; analytics service Similarweb corroborated this, estimating an average of 64.7 million visitors per month across its publications. That would place BBM among the 30 most-trafficked English-language media enterprises on the web, with a readership substantially higher than NPR, narrowly beating CBS News and Forbes, and sitting just behind the Washington Post.

There’s a staggering difference, though, between BBM and those legitimate news organizations. NPR and the Washington Post employ hundreds or even thousands of journalists to gather and report news. BBM, according to former insiders, 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, BBM uses AI to crank out content at a scale so immense it’s difficult to comprehend—and it does so with breathtaking dishonesty. The company has invented more than 50 entirely fictional writer personas spread across its dozens of sites, publishing content under their names without ever revealing they weren’t real people. On Space Daily, one of its most successful publications, BBM published articles under bylines attributed to “Dr. Katherine Chen,” supposedly a former systems engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who had spent fifteen years designing autonomous systems for deep space missions, and “Dr. James Whitfield,” described as an aerospace medicine researcher at the European Space Agency. Neither person exists. NASA’s site makes no mention of Chen; the ESA confirmed Whitfield never worked there. On Direct Message News, a tech site, BBM invented “Rachel Vaughn,” supposedly a Dublin-based psychologist with a degree that, as it turns out, doesn’t even exist at Trinity College Dublin. Her headshot was a stock photo.

The fake personas extended far beyond fabricated experts to entire fabricated lives, crafted to exploit human vulnerability. BBM invented “Marlene Martin,” a retired high school English teacher who drew on “decades of lived experience” to explore personal development and finding purpose in life’s second act—at least, according to one of dozens of bios she supposedly wrote. Her age fluctuated wildly across articles: 68 in January, 69 with two bad knees in February, 71 by March, then somehow 70 in April after her husband allegedly died. “Sarah Mitchell,” a fake clinical psychologist at Silicon Canals, published a sentimental essay about her baby’s first word being “Max,” the name of the family dog—then wrote weeks later that she didn’t have a dog. “Adam Kelton” wrote about his mother’s passive-aggressive behavior at restaurants in the present tense, describing lunch with her the previous week, then published a piece two days later about joining a grief support group because his mother had died eleven months ago from pancreatic cancer. On VegOut, a vegan magazine BBM purchased, a fake author named “Jordan Cooper” published an “investigation” of LA’s recycling system that was a blatant rip-off of a CBS8 San Diego investigation, complete with an AI-generated image flagged by detectors and text that came back as 100 percent AI-generated. Longtime readers were appalled by the transformation of publications they’d loved, with comments like “Never seen a brand destroyed this quickly” and “pure AI slop” echoing across social media. The original founder of VegOut publicly addressed it, saying the new owners had “turned it into just another AI-written content website.”

The human cost of BBM’s empire is arguably its darkest stain. Before generative AI, BBM relied largely on human writers in the Philippines and other lower-income countries to produce content. One former contractor told investigators she’d always dreamed of being a writer, and was delighted to land a gig at BBM in 2022—before the AI explosion that would consume the company. Filipino writers worked without formal contracts, aware they could be let go at any time. After ChatGPT’s release in November 2022, BBM initially banned employees from using AI, warning they had detection tools. That soon changed. By 2023, BBM began testing “robot” content, eventually building its own internal AI tool into the company’s WordPress backend that could generate entire articles in minutes—staff just selected a topic like “zodiac” or “love and relationship advice,” chose a tone like “friendly” or “informative,” and the AI produced an article. The Brown brothers themselves, who had personally bylined articles for years, were now generating their pieces through a dropdown menu in the AI tool that let staff select the voice of the author, including the brothers’ own voices. Internal spreadsheets chart the cullings: BBM had upwards of 60 active writers in December 2023, down to around 40 by May 2024, about 20 by August, and just 12 by December 2024—all of them using AI. One former writer began to choke up describing her experience. “It’s just really difficult… I still really love writing,” she said through tears. “People need to know that writers and artists are being replaced with AI.” Another Filipino writer added, “It felt a little dystopian, honestly, to have your writing used to train AI, and then to have that AI replace you.”

When investigators from Futurism began asking questions in early May, BBM embarked on a frantic deletion spree, scrubbing what appeared to be many thousands of articles and the fake authors who’d bylined them. Entire publications were locked down. Even Justin’s original YouTube video was delisted. BBM issued statements admitting, in carefully euphemistic terms, that “our publications used contributor bylines that did not identify real people, and some of those biographies included credentials that were not real.” But nothing substantive changed. After the purge, BBM continued posting massive amounts of clearly AI-generated material with minimal human oversight. Testing 30 recent articles through AI detectors, every single one came back as 100 percent AI-generated with zero signs of human editing. The strategy merely shifted: instead of fake writers, BBM began publishing under generalized bylines like “VegOut Editorial Team” and “Space Daily Editorial Team”—which produced baffling results, since these impersonal bylines were now used for deeply personal first-person essays. Even worse, BBM began publishing under the names of actual living humans, using them as “meat proxies,” affixing their names to fully AI-spun pieces as a deceitful attempt at plausible deniability intended to bamboozle Google. One such writer published at least 85 articles in a single week across multiple BBM sites—more than 90,000 words, longer than George Orwell’s “1984”—complete with the same continuity errors the fake writers had produced: claiming to have been 11 years old in 1995 while also being 38 now, and inexplicably referring to himself as a “daughter.” Even Lachlan Brown bylined an article musing about “my now-husband,” despite writing extensively elsewhere about being married to a woman.

Google’s response to BBM’s empire of schlock doesn’t inspire confidence. The tech giant prohibits “scaled content abuse,” which it defines as generating many pages for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings. BBM’s entire operation—using the corpses of reliable publications to create an AI-powered imitation of a media company, built on fake writers and redundant or incoherent content—seems like a textbook example. Yet Google took no lasting action. After investigators sent detailed questions, the company briefly deindexed several BBM sites, only for them to reappear in search results weeks later. As of publication, BBM articles were still appearing prominently on Google’s platforms. The final absurdity: when BBM issued a retraction notice for a fabricated article bylined by Justin Brown, admitting that interview anecdotes and quotations “could not be substantiated,” no one noticed. At any legitimate publication, this would have been an explosive journalism scandal on the level of Stephen Glass or Jayson Blair. But BBM’s retraction drew zero attention, because BBM is a media organization carefully designed to look robust and trustworthy while being only a façade. As the investigators noted, perhaps the Brown brothers have operated their blundering AI empire for years without reading what they publish, ignorantly believing in their own vacuous promises. Or perhaps—more likely, given their machinations—they know exactly what they’re doing and just don’t care. In a final ironic twist, BBM recently launched a site called Sentient Blogs, positioning it as a platform dedicated to human authorship in an era of shoddy AI content, promising “human generated content, not AI.” Lachlan bylined a piece about his touchingly human experiences with fatherhood. A disclaimer at the bottom, dissonantly, said it was “produced with AI assistance.” According to AI detectors, it was 100 percent AI-generated.