Space Daily Becomes AI Content Farm After Acquisition, Fake Expert Bylines Exposed

Space Daily, a space media outlet running for over 30 years, has been publishing large amounts of misleading AI-generated content after being acquired by Brown Brothers Media. The site gets an estimated 10 million views per month, but behind the traffic are fake expert bylines. A Futurism investigation found that authors "Dr. Katherine Chen" and "Dr. James Whitfield" do not exist. Chen was described as a former NASA engineer, and Whitfield as a European Space Agency researcher. ESA stated Whitfield was never employed there, and NASA has no record of Chen.

After the investigation began, Brown Brothers Media started mass-deleting articles and removing fake author profiles. The company admitted it had used bylines not corresponding to real people, with some bios containing false credentials, and said it has stopped the practice.

After the cleanup, Space Daily still publishes many articles, now under names like "Editorial Team" that are hard to verify. Its homepage once featured a story about ESA's Rosetta probe that was over a decade old. Pangram detection showed some articles were entirely AI-generated with no human editing.