Have you ever heard of BBM?


That’s Brown Brothers Media, and you’ve probably read some of their articles. They produce Space Daily, which I’ve encountered a few times, and a hodge-podge of other online ‘journals’, like Scandinavian Standard, Silicon Canals, Sentient Blogs, The Law Dictionary, Science Blog, Mars Daily, Solar Daily, and Nuclear Power Daily, as well as a lot of squishy pop psychology sites, and even one titled Bible Scriptures. They are indiscriminate in the topics they claim to cover, and churn out a tremendous volume of articles that they feed into the Google mill.

How do they do that? They’re based in South East Asia, and they started by hiring low-cost regional writers who could churn out articles with little research, but then they ended up firing most of them and going even cheaper.

“More and more writers became robot writers,” the former contractor said, “until it came to a point where everyone’s just a robot writer, essentially.”

At first, she told us, the robot writers were scrambling to “create our own prompts” to feed into ChatGPT, or were provided with prompts that the writer understood to have been created by the Brown brothers. By 2024, BBM was so invested in the tech that it rolled out its own internal AI tool. It was built into the company’s WordPress backend, the former writer told us, where it could generate entire articles straight into the content management system — with a series of options that let staff quickly specify what type of piece the AI should spit out.

“They started developing this AI tool that generates articles in a couple of minutes,” the former writer explained. “You just select the topic it belongs under (like zodiac, love and relationship advice, etc) and then you’d select the tone (friendly, informative, etc) and it generates an article for you.”

The Brown brothers, particularly Justin and Lachlan, have personally bylined prodigious numbers of articles for their publishing empire, where they typically strike a tone of chin-stroking wisdom about topics ranging from life and spirituality to psychology and society. But according to another former contractor and internal documentation obtained by Futurism, their articles are AI-generated as well, and the company’s AI tool includes a dropdown menu that lets users select the voice of the author in which to generate a piece — including the Brown brothers themselves. (AI detectors corroborate the claim that prior to BBM’s embrace of AI, articles attributed to the brothers were human-written, but are now entirely AI-generated.)

They’re not done. They’re branching out into technology companies that produce more AI dreck.

The Brown brothers also appear to be involved with several AI companies that have marketed AI “scaling” techniques as a service, using language suggesting that they may produce similar content for other media ventures.

Two of these startups, Mosquito Fleet and Tippa Fleet, have United Arab Emirates business addresses and claim on nearly–identical sites to “specialize in using artificial intelligence to improve and scale content production for our partner websites.”

Another company linked to the Brown brothers, Cognitive AI Systems Limited, is registered in the British Virgin Islands. A version of its site archived in February 2025 marketed “state-of-the-art AI technologies to scale content responsibly,” emphasizing that potential partners could “tailor AI capabilities to fit your content production needs, whether you publish daily or by the minute.” By earlier this year, however, that language was gone, with the site’s homepage instead declaring that “Cognitive AI Systems Limited owns a portfolio of digital publications operated by Brown Brothers Media.”

Look forward to even more slop on the web. They are pumping out so much garbage, that they aren’t even bothering to proofread anymore. Why should they? It’s not as if quality matters in their content.

Sometimes it appears that BBM has been so sloppy that it’s affixed the wrong name to a piece generated for a different author. Though Lachlan has written extensively about being married to a woman and having a young daughter, for example, the BBM cofounder recently bylined a May Expert Editor article — titled “10 Signs a Man Is Trustworthy and Has Good Intentions” — in which he mused that “in my personal experience, I knew my now-husband was a keeper when he bravely voiced his insecurities and fears about his career early into our relationship.”

At times, it’s difficult to believe that any human at BBM is taking a single look at drafts before they’re published, or even afterward. Another BBM property, Eluxe Magazine, seems to have accidentally published a pair of articles attributed to Lachlan this summer which consist of nothing more than a few lines of garbled computer code — where they remain pinned to the top of the publication’s home page at the time of this story’s publication.

I guess you can’t trust anything you read on the internet. At the very least you should avoid anything on this list of every known BBM publication.

Comments

  1. says

    In Canada BBM was Bureau of Broadcast Measurement, the former name of Numeris. They’re run by the Canadian Association of Broadcasters. the association of commercial broadcasters up here, and provide radio and television broadcast ratings. It was also an abbreviation for Blackberry Messenger. They don’t seem to have any music industry stuff going by that image, but with AI that could change at a moment’s notice.

  2. says

    Garbage in Garbage Out and All Quantity, No Quality Both certainly apply here!
    This is how Stupor Intelligence aids and abets the war on intelligence.

  3. seachange says

    They might be lazier and scammier than you think.

    Did their AI come up with those “journal” names, and do the graphic design?

  4. Steve Morrison says

    Well, the old verse “IBM / UBM/ We all BM / For IBM” needs an update: “We all BM for BBM!”

  5. IX-103, the ■■■■ing idiot says

    I’m not sure that “traditional publishers” like the Times of India are any better. They may have an actual person write an initial story and then use AI to rewrite many different versions of the article and headline. They then cycle between these so that web scrapers think there is new content. Many of these articles are all low effort slop based on actual reporting from other news agencies.

  6. nomdeplume says

    The world needs a new legal system in which people who behave in such a way could be jailed for life.

  7. StevoR says

    hat’s Brown Brothers Media, and you’ve probably read some of their articles. They produce Space Daily, which I’ve encountered a few times,

    Yes. Recently seen quite a few Space Daily news articles turn up on my feed. Didn’t know about the ret of tehm or about the AI shit. Thought they seemed generally okay but.. yeah. Not so now.

    The only one one that seems quite familiar is Science blog tho’ that seems a blast form the past..

  8. John Morales says

    nomdeplume,

    The world needs a new legal system in which people who behave in such a way could be jailed for life.

    Harsh, and unfair. Internet glop has been a thing since the very start.
    Maybe save your imprisonment fantasies for more meritorious candidates.

    Geez!
    They put up stuff that makes them money because clueless people click on their clickbait.
    Nobody is harmed thereby.

    (Religious proselytisers are much more deserving)

  9. StevoR says

    @9. nomdeplume : We need a justice system rather than a legal one. An ethical justice system where what is ethically right and what is environmentally right over-rides the mere letter of the law and one which is equally accessible to everyone and NOT only the playground and tool of the obscenely rich and big companies.

  10. dangerousbeans says

    Truly the next industrial revolution! Bold new frontiers in profiting off disinformation

  11. rorschach says

    Read somewhere that 50% of websites are now AI slop. 30% of the books on Amazon are AI slop or plagiarising some real books. AI has broken the internet as it used to be already. Google search is defunct, websites don’t get crawled anymore for content because AI ignores the robots.txt, and on and on it goes. Someone called this the collapse of information integrity, and I think that’s apt.

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