AI Theft Of Independent Journalism Is Now Common – And You Can Do Something About It

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Lots of online media consumers are getting their information these days from AI. It’s easy and quick, right? But there are downsides to this trend that lets AI do the research for you. More and more legacy media outlets are depending on AI to fill their content outflows. In other words, AI now writes the stories that humans have composed for the last two centuries. Then there’s the issue of AI-generated mis- and disinformation — it’s rampant. And recently it was revealed that AI theft is taking place — content composed by real human journalists is being republished without our permission and used to prop up sites’ questionable authenticity.

What Starts as Misinformation can Become AI Theft

An article in National Today titled “New York Passes Law Regulating AI in News and Entertainment” caught the attention of a number of interested readers. Was New York state, in fact, superseding freedom of speech laws to take AI mis– and disinformation into its own hands?

Not so fast. The article was not authentic, nor was it author a human, and the website is run by a venture capitalist. Yup, you know what’s coming — the site’s goal is to make content profitable, the means be damned.

How would you as an average reader discern if that article was factual or fiction? You’d probably type in, “Is [this idea/ claim/ brand] true or false?” When a false narrative or misinformation about a brand starts circulating on AI answer engines, Ostwal explains, “people who are searching on the web often do try to figure out if it’s real or not.” Is there, actually, a way to tell whether an information source is reliable, or AI theft?

It’s becoming more difficult as large language models (LLMs) get more sophisticated due to the amount of data they’re digesting.

Ostwal writes in Ad Week how AI assistants like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews “hallucinate” when they see a prompt like this — they key in on the concept rather than the questioning of the content and detect a surge in that same search. AI uses data, algorithms, and feedback loops to learn patterns, make predictions, and automate decisions at scale. AI assesses a new or increased demand, and, without human intervention to provide a checks-and-balances, the once-uncertain content jumps to the top of search feeds. The same pattern occurs with news about brands.

By the way, a kernel of the article about the New York AI law is true. Senator Patricia Fahy (D-NY) has introduced a bill to regulate AI-generated news. The FAIR News Act seeks to regulate AI-generated news articles like those about cigarettes. Advocates for the FAIR Act argue that such transparency notifications will give consumers the tools to separate AI-generated content from human-composed reporting — the latter of which is an article like this one that you are reading.

Fahy asserts that the public has a right to know when the content they’re reading is AI-generated, to the point that she insists, “The future of journalism, in my view, is on the line, and I don’t say that to be hyperbolic.”

AI Theft is Taking Place across All Kinds of Information Sources

We’ve heard testimony from artists and creators that AI companies are copying output without permission and using it to train their LLMs. A lawsuit by a coalition of about 400 local news outlets has accused OpenAI and Microsoft of doing so and then presenting the information as original to online information consumers.

A study by a pre-print server for biology, bioRxiv, finds that paper mills often inflate the citation metrics of supported publications and affected journals. Moreover, the manipulation of citation metrics at scale “may amplify unreliable findings, slowing scientific progress, and providing unreasonable citation benchmarks for research articles, journals, and authors.” The researchers conclude that there are “new risks in relying on citation metrics for research and journal evaluation,” and they support the use of more robust metrics to describe article and journal quality.

And what about stories that have been composed by humans but cross-posted on other sites without journalist permission or compensation? Such plagiarism accusations are rampant.

I was recently contacted by Stephen Weller, the director of public affairs at Extrinsic Intelligence (xi.ie), a consultancy working around media, technology, and policy. They’re currently working on a campaign fighting information disorder, and he tells me, “We’ve been lucky enough to get some funding from affected parties to tackle this issue.”

He reached out to me because one of my articles is on the New York Post‘s site — and it has been copied and used to infuse integrity into what Weller says is “a misinformation network.” It seems that everyday, according to xi.ie’s own site, “thousands of articles written by professional journalists are copied, republished, and redistributed without permission across networks of websites that present themselves as legitimate news outlets.”

He’s been contacting journalists whose articles have been stolen to give us a heads-up and offer us the chance to get involved.

Here’s my original article:

We Need To Save Earth’s Soil — Changing Our Food Choices Can Help

Here is the plagiarized article:
https://civic-herald.com/index.php/news/item/215417-we-need-to-save-earth-s-soil-changing-our-food-choices-can-help

Weller says, “These sites do this in order to trick search algorithms, legitimize their content, and spread their nefarious agendas.” At xi.ie, they’re building software to scan and, “hopefully,” reduce the size of these networks. They assert — and I agree — that “legitimate journalism should not be subsidizing networks that exploit copyrighted work while undermining trust in the information ecosystem.”

If you might lean on the side of skepticism and infer that my plagiarized article was a rare occurrence, check out my portfolio on Muckrack. When you see the same article posted on different websites, I haven’t given any of them permission to do so. And I do not want to offer my writing as a mechanism to reinforce misinformation or disinformation or to promote or sanction hatred in any form.

You, too, can speak out and voice your displeasure at AI informing your daily life. The legacy news outlets need to know that you care about honesty in journalism.

References

“Brands may be bankrolling the AI misinformation spreading about them.” Trishla Ostwal. Ad Week. June 30, 2026.

“Journalists against content theft (JACT): A call to reclaim the information ecosystem.” Extrinsic Intelligence. 2026.

“How does AI actually work?” Colorado State University Global.

“New York wants cigarette-style labels on AI-generated fake news.” Mark Keierleber. Straight Arrow News. June 30, 2026.

“Suspected distortion of citations in high-impact cancer journals.” Baptiste Scancar, et al. bioRxiv. May 26, 2026.