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The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) has come back online nearly a decade after shutting down. But the once venerable source of Apple news appears to have been transformed by its new owners into an AI-generated content farm.<\/p>\n
The site, which ceased operations in 2015, began publishing \u201cnew\u201d articles, many of which appear to be nearly identical to content published by MacRumors and other publications, over the past week. But those posts bear the bylines of writers who last worked for TUAW more than a decade ago. The site also has an author page<\/a> featuring the names of former writers along with photos that appear to be AI-generated.<\/p>\n Christina Warren, who last wrote for TUAW in 2009, flagged the<\/a> sketchy tactic in a post on Threads. \u201cSomeone bought the TUAW domain, populated it with AI-generated slop, and then reused my name from a job I had when I was 21 years old to try to pull some SEO scam that won\u2019t even work in 2024 because Google changed its algo,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n Originally started in 2004, TUAW was shut down by AOL in 2015<\/a>. Much of the site\u2019s original archive can still be found on Engadget<\/a>. Yahoo, which owns Engadget, sold the TUAW domain in 2024 to an entity called \u201cWeb Orange Limited\u201d in 2024, according to a statement on TUAW\u2019s website.<\/p>\n The sale, notably, did not include the TUAW archive. But, it seems that Web Orange Limited found a convenient (if legally dubious) way around that. \u201cWith a commitment to revitalize its legacy, the new team at Web Orange Limited meticulously rewrote the content from archived versions available on archive.org, ensuring the preservation of TUAW\u2019s rich history while updating it to meet modern standards and relevance,\u201d the site\u2019s about page states<\/a>.<\/p>\n TUAW doesn\u2019t say if AI was used in those \u201crewrites,\u201d but a comparison between the original archive<\/a> on Engadget and the \u201crewritten\u201d content on TUAW<\/a> suggests that Web Orange Limited put little effort into the task. \u201cThe article \u2018rewrites\u2019 aren\u2019t even assigned to the correct names,\u201d Warren tells Engadget, \u201cIt has stuff for me going back to 2004. I didn\u2019t start writing for the site until 2007.\u201d<\/p>\n TUAW didn\u2019t immediately respond to emailed questions about its use of AI or why it was using the bylines of former writers with AI-generated profile photos. Yahoo didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n