The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) is back online after nearly a decade of shutdown. But the once venerable source of Apple news appears to have been turned into an AI-generated content farm by its new owners.
The site, which was shut down in 2015, began publishing “new” articles over the past week, many of which appear to be nearly identical to content published by MacRumors and other publications. But these posts contain the names of writers who last worked for TUAW more than ten years ago. It is also available on the site along with names of past writers and AI-generated photos.
Christina Warren, who last wrote for TUAW in 2009, A sketch tactic in a post on Threads. “Someone bought the TUAW domain, filled it with an AI-generated blank, and then reused my name from a job I did when I was 21 to try to pull some SEO scam that won’t even work in 2024 because Google changed their domain. algo,” he wrote.
Originally started in 2004, TUAW was shut down by AOL . Much of the site’s original archive can still be found . Yahoo, which owns Engadget, sold the TUAW domain in 2024 to an entity called Web Orange Limited.
The sale notably did not include the TUAW archive. But it seems Web Orange Limited has found a convenient (if legally dubious) way around it. “Committed to reviving its legacy, the new team at Web Orange Limited has carefully rewritten the content from the archived versions available on archive.org, ensuring that TUAW’s rich history is preserved while updating it to modern standards and relevance.” page states.
TUAW does not say whether artificial intelligence is used in these “re-correspondences”, but their comparison original archive On Engadget and “rewritten” content in TUAW Web suggests that Orange Limited has made little effort to complete the assignment. “The ‘Rewrites’ article isn’t even attributed to the right names,” Warren tells Engadget, “There’s a lot to me before 2004. I didn’t start writing for the site until 2007.”
TUAW did not immediately respond to emailed questions about its use of AI or why it uses AI-generated profile photos of former writers. Yahoo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
