Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are increasingly being used to populate 'content farms', low-quality websites that churn out large volumes of clickbait articles to optimise advertising revenue. According to analysis by NewsGuard, many of these sites are saturated with advertisements, suggesting they were designed to generate revenue from programmatic ads.

NewsGuard has identified dozens of such websites across seven languages that appear to be largely or entirely populated by content generated by AI language models. These sites often fail to disclose ownership or control and produce a high volume of content on various topics. Some publish hundreds of articles a day, some of which advance false narratives. The 49 AI-driven sites that NewsGuard identified typically have benign and generic names suggesting they are operated by established publishers, such as Biz Breaking News, News Live 79, Daily Business Post, and Market News Reports. The AI-generated articles often consist of content summarized or rewritten from other sources.

NewsGuard sent emails to the 29 sites in the analysis that listed contact information, and two confirmed that they have used AI. The AI-generated articles often consist of content summarised or rewritten from other sources. Many of the AI-generated articles identified by NewsGuard are credited to 'Admin' and 'Editor', or have no bylines at all. Other sites feature fake author profiles.

Some of the sites also include About and Privacy Policy pages that were algorithmically produced by tools used to generate customisable disclaimers and copyright notices, but were not fully completed. All 49 sites identified by NewsGuard had published at least one article containing error messages commonly found in AI-generated texts. To date, NewsGuard’s team has identified 702 Unreliable AI-Generated News and information websites, labelled 'UAINS', spanning 15 languages. These websites typically have generic names and operate with little to no human oversight, publishing articles written largely or entirely by bots.

The articles have sometimes included false claims, including about political leaders, celebrity death hoaxes, fabricated events, and articles presenting old events as if they just occurred. In many cases, the revenue model for these websites is programmatic advertising, leading to top brands unintentionally supporting these sites.