If you've followed Apple news and rumors for the past decade, you might remember The Unofficial Apple Weblog, or TUAW as it was known. TUAW has since been shut down and the site is now Engadget Back in 2015, the zombie TUAW website reappeared this month.
As it turns out, TUAW's domain name was purchased by a Hong Kong advertising agency and is hosting stolen content that has been rewritten using AI. TUAW began posting AI-generated content earlier this week, all of which was stolen from sites such as: MacRumors and 9to5Mac.
The new TUAW website takes articles from Apple's news site, runs them through AI, changes the wording, and plagiarizes several images. MacRumors These articles use graphics created by our in-house graphic designers: for example, shortly after we published our rundown of the iPhone 17 “Slim,” TUAW published a nearly identical article that used images we'd stolen and looked as if they'd been run through a thesaurus.
The company that bought TUAW shamelessly used the names of people who worked on the site years ago as author names, making it look like this stolen content came from people like Christina Warren and Brett Terpstra.
After publishing the zombie site on Mastodon, Warren was successful in having her name and the names of other prominent writers removed, but the AI content remains. TUAW changed Christina Warren's byline on the site to Mary Brown, along with other similarly generic name changes. TUAW has no actual writers, just AI-generated images and bios to go with the AI content.
The advertising agency that purchased the TUAW domain name (Web Orange Limited) did not purchase TUAW content, but instead generated AI-rewritten versions of archived TUAW articles from archive.org. Thousands of these articles are featured on the site along with newly generated AI articles.
It is worth noting that the company that purchased the TUAW domain name also purchased the iLounge domain name a few years ago and resurrected that site with low-quality content.
Tidbits, The Verge, Engadget, 404 Mediaand other sites have done deep dives into TUAW and the company behind it and are worth checking out. TUAW's owners do not appear to be based in the US, and it's unclear whether TUAW will be taken down even if there are legal complaints.
Reader's MacRumors, 9to5Macand other tech sites may want to avoid TUAW in the future. Tidbits Google points out that this is a big factor in TUAW's situation because Google hasn't disincentivized AI-generated content, even though the site is mostly AI content: TUAW articles appear on the first page of search results alongside legitimate tech sites.