Dead tech blog now publishing using AI with old bylines

The Unofficial Apple Weblog, a legendary and long-dead Apple-centric tech news blog, is publishing new content using artificial intelligence and the bylines of former journalists, reports Jason Koebler of 404 Media.

Koebler reports, “This month, ‘Christina Warren’ started blogging again for The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), a legendary and long-dead Apple-centric tech news blog that she worked at more than a decade ago. Warren was for years a well-known and very good tech journalist, before she went on to work for Microsoft and GitHub. The real Christina Warren hasn’t been writing these new posts on the zombie TUAW, however. The site’s new owners have stolen her identity, replaced her photo with an AI-generated one, and have been publishing what appear to be AI-generated articles under her byline.

“Worse, the new version of TUAW has ‘recreated’ the archives of the site by running old, real articles through a summarization tool and then republishing new, ‘bastardized versions’ of the old articles under the bylines of real writers who didn’t actually write them, Warren said. The names and bios of dozens of real journalists who actually worked for TUAW a decade ago are listed on the website, and all of them have had their real images replaced with AI-generated ones, and their old work misattributed to other people and turned into AI slop by a summarization tool that has destroyed their original work.”

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