If you've been following Apple news and rumors for the last decade, you might remember The Unofficial Apple Weblog, or TUAW. TUAW was shut down and the site was folded into Engadget way back in 2015, but this month, a zombie TUAW website reappeared.
As it turns out, the TUAW domain name was purchased by a Hong Kong-based advertising agency, and it now hosts stolen content rewritten using AI. TUAW started posting AI-generated content earlier this week, with all of it stolen from sites like MacRumors and 9to5Mac.
The new TUAW website takes articles from Apple news sites and runs them through AI to change the wording. There are multiple stolen images that have been lifted from MacRumors for these articles, with the graphics used created by our in-house graphic designer. Shortly after we published an iPhone 17 "Slim" overview, for example, TUAW published an almost identical article that uses our stolen imagery and reads like it was run through a thesaurus.
The company that bought TUAW also shamelessly used the names of people who worked at the site many years ago for author bylines, which meant this stolen content looked like it was coming from people like Christina Warren and Brett Terpstra.
Warren was able to get her name and the names of other prominent writers removed after publicizing the zombie site on Mastodon, but the AI content remains. TUAW changed the Christina Warren byline on its site to Mary Brown, making other similar generic name changes. There are no actual writers at TUAW, just AI-generated images and biographies to go along with the AI content.
The advertising agency that purchased the TUAW domain name (Web Orange Limited) did not purchase any TUAW content, but went back and generated AI-rewritten versions of archived TUAW articles from archive.org. Thousands of these articles are on the site alongside newly generated AI stories.
It is worth noting that the company that bought the TUAW domain name also purchased the iLounge domain name several years ago and resurrected that site with low-quality content.
TidBITS, The Verge, Engadget, 404Media, and other sites have done deep dives into TUAW and the company behind it that are worth checking out. TUAW's owner does not appear to be based in the United States, and it's unclear if TUAW will be taken down even with legal complaints.
Readers of MacRumors, 9to5Mac, and other tech sites will want to avoid TUAW going forward. As TidBITS points out, Google is a major factor in what's going on with TUAW because it isn't de-incentivizing AI-generated content, even on a site where it's almost all AI content. TUAW articles are showing up on the first page of search results alongside legitimate tech sites.
