The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) is back online nearly a decade after it was shut down, but the site, once a reliable source of Apple news, appears to have been transformed by its new owners into an AI-generated content farm.
The site, which closed in 2015, has begun posting “new” articles over the past week, many of which appear to be roughly the same content that appeared on MacRumors and other publications, but they are bylined by writers who last worked at TUAW over a decade ago. The site also has an author page that lists the names of former writers and what appear to be AI-generated photos.
Christina Warren, a 2009 TUAW contributor, warned of this shady practice in a thread post: “Someone bought the TUAW domain, filled it with random AI-generated words, and reused the name of a job I had when I was 21 in an attempt to pull an SEO scam that won't work in 2024 when Google changes their algorithm,” Warren wrote.
TUAW was launched in 2004 but was shut down by AOL in 2015. Many of the site's original archives can still be found on Engadget. Yahoo, which owns Engadget, sold the TUAW domain to a company called “Web Orange Limited” in 2024, according to a statement on TUAW's website.
Notably, the sale did not include the TUAW archives, but Web Orange Limited appears to have found a convenient (albeit legally questionable) way around that issue: “Determined to revive its heritage, the new team at Web Orange Limited has meticulously rewritten the archived content available on archive.org, updating it to modern standards and relevance while ensuring that TUAW's rich history is preserved,” the site's About page states.
TUAW doesn't say whether AI was used in these “rewrites,” but a comparison of Engadget's original archives with TUAW's “rewrite” content shows that Web Orange Limited put very little effort into the task. “The 'rewrites' of the articles don't even have proper names assigned to them,” Warren told Engadget. “There are articles of mine on there going back to 2004; I didn't start writing on the site until 2007.”
TUAW did not immediately respond to emailed questions about its use of AI or why it uses bylines from former writers with AI-generated profile photos. Yahoo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
