A Highly Trafficked Space News Site Invented a Fake NASA Engineer and Used Her Name to Publish to AI-Generated Slop

Space Daily, a venerable space publication that has been in circulation for over three decades, has transformed into a mere shadow of its former self since being acquired by Brown Brothers Media. This shift has led to the website becoming a breeding ground for misleading and poorly sourced AI-generated content, prompting Futurism to investigate the matter further.

Among the many fabricated identities employed by the media conglomerate, two prominent examples were "Dr. Katherine Chen" and "Dr. James Whitfield." Both were purportedly experts in their respective fields—NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the European Space Agency—but were subsequently revealed to be mere fabrications. Neither entity exists in reality, and Brown Brothers Media resorted to creating these personas to publish large volumes of content under the guise of reputable authorities.

Subsequently, Brown Brothers Media swiftly deleted numerous articles and purged the fabricated writers, including Chen and Whitfield. However, the company's misdeeds did not go unnoticed, and it subsequently announced the discontinuation of using bylines that did not identify genuine individuals. The company has since begun removing or correcting the articles published under these fictitious identities and is in the process of establishing network-wide editorial standards.

Despite these efforts, Space Daily continues to publish articles, but they now bear less recognizable bylines such as "Space Daily Editorial Team" or "Mission Notes." The content, however, has not improved, with the homepage featuring an outdated piece about a space encounter taking place over a decade ago. The article's lackluster quality is indicative of the website's overall decline in standards.

The publishing house appears to rely on shadowy bylines and AI-generated content to drive clicks and manipulate search engine algorithms. One particularly convoluted article on the gas stream falling onto a triple star system has been deemed entirely AI-generated, with no trace of human editing. The author of this piece, Chris Jeremia, also appears to be a "meat proxy," employed by Brown Brothers Media to affix their name to fully AI-generated content.

Despite their real-world existence, Jeremia's editorial authority seems to be no greater than that of Dr. Chen and Dr. Whitfield. Brown Brothers Media may be attempting to capitalize on the illusory credibility of these fabricated identities, but the truth is increasingly hard to ignore. The decline of Space Daily serves as a cautionary tale of the pitfalls of merging content mills with legitimate news sources.