TUAW
This article is a stub. You can help the IndieWeb wiki by expanding it.
TUAW(.com) (AKA The Unofficial Apple Weblog) was a long-lived technology media site and blog which shutdown in 2015 whose domain was purchased in 2024 and relaunched as a zombie site using slop articles based on its prior content and GenAI fake images of prior authors using their actual names.
Articles
- 2024-07-09 Ad agency zombifies TUAW with AI copy & recycled bylines in stupid SEO play
- 2024-07-09 A Beloved Tech Blog Is Now Publishing AI Articles Under the Names of Its Old Human Staff / TUAW, a site that was shut down 10 years ago, was sold to a private equity firm, then to a company in Hong Kong, and has now stolen its old workers' identities and is running their old work through AI summarizers.
- 2024-07-10 The Verge: Early Apple tech bloggers are shocked to find their name and work have been AI-zombified / TUAW, ‘The Unofficial Apple Weblog,’ has been recreated in an incredibly scummy way.
- 2024-07-10 TUAW makes a sad return as an AI-powered stolen content farm
The domain was acquired by Yahoo, which recently sold it – without any rights to the content – to a company called Web Orange Limited (WOL). This is when things get messy.
- 2024-07-11 Ars Technica: Shady company relaunches popular old tech blogs, steals writers’ identities / This doesn't just threaten writers' work—it has a corrosive effect on the web.
In one of the most egregiously unethical uses of AI we've seen, a web advertising company has re-created some defunct, classic tech blogs, like The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) and iLounge, by mimicking the bylines of the websites' former writers and publishing AI-generated content under their names.
- 2024-07-12 Mashable: Someone is turning old Apple blogs into AI content factories with fake authors / Who thought this was a good idea?