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Being fired was only the first indignity that one freelance writer had to suffer.
Even though Ben Touati was no longer working at ClickOut Media, new articles continued to appear under his name. An AI, it turned out, had taken over his byline, churning out stuff that was far below the standards he held for his real work.
The situation felt like a “slap in the face,” Touati told Press Gazette. The articles started appearing just days after he was fired from ClickOut’s German operation.
“The five articles were just like lazy, obviously slop, obviously there’s not a real person that is behind that,” the Stockholm-based writer fumed.
A statement from ClickOut Media didn’t address why it was effectively impersonating a former employee with AI.
“We use AI-assisted content where appropriate in tandem with human checks and edits,” it said in the statement, per Press Gazette. “We continue to evolve our AI agents to be more accurate and improve our human editorial processes.”
Heaps of online publishers are embracing AI — often deceptively — and Clickout Media is right up there with the worst of them.
Earlier this year, it became the center of controversy after an article on one of its websites, Videogamer, turned out to be written by a bogus AI journalist. That was just the tip of the iceberg; so were plenty of other articles on its other outlets that it had gobbled up and hollowed out, with some of the fake authors even coming with AI-generated profile photos.
Touati first began working with Clickout Media in early 2024 and was moved around between its different sites — including Techopedia, iGaming, and Esports Insider — seemingly on no more than his managers’ whims. He said he had to repeatedly resist pressure to use AI to write articles. Managers would say, “It’s almost impossible to get by without AI these days.” Employees were also shown a video on how to create and “humanize” AI-written articles.
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