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The space publication Space Daily, which has been operating for over three decades, has become an unrecognizable shell of its former self after a company called Brown Brothers Media bought it and turned it into a content mill that pumps out misleading and badly sourced AI slop.
As a Futurism investigation found, Space Daily is averaging an estimated ten million page views per month. That would be an incredible success story — if it weren’t for the fact that it’s been platforming non-existent experts as puppets to churn out AI garbage.
Case in point, one of the website’s authors, “Dr. Katherine Chen,” was identified as a former “systems engineer” at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who “spent fifteen years designing autonomous systems for deep space missions,” according to her since-deleted profile on the site.
A different writer, listed as “Dr. James Whitfield” by Space Daily, was allegedly an “aerospace medicine researcher at the European Space Agency.”
But Futurism confirmed that neither Chen nor Whitfield actually exist. Instead, Brown Brothers Media invented their personas to publish slop on a massive scale under the bylines of what looked like trustworthy experts.
“Mr. James Whitfield is not currently employed by the European Space Agency, nor do our records indicate that he has ever worked here in the past,” the ESA told us in a statement. While NASA declined to comment, its website doesn’t make a single mention of a “Katherine Chen.”
After we started investigating Brown Brothers Media, the company began mass-deleting vast numbers of articles. It also deleted many of the fake writers, including Chen and Whitfield.
“Before May 2026, our publications used contributor bylines that did not identify real people, and some of those biographies included credentials that were not real,” the company conceded in a statement. “That was wrong. In May, we stopped publishing under those bylines, began removing or correcting the older articles involved, and published network-wide and per-site editorial standards. That review is ongoing.”
After the mass culling, Space Daily is still publishing plenty of articles, albeit under shadowy bylines like “Space Daily Editorial Team,” or “Mission Notes.” Many of the articles claim to have been edited by either one of the Brown Brothers Media founders, a member of its editorial team, or a constellation of contributors.
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