Greta Kerkhoff, the editor in chief of the University of Colorado Boulder’s student newspaper, was expecting to spend her final year of college working at the paper and completing her journalism degree. Then the newspaper’s old website was taken over by what appeared to be spam content generated by artificial intelligence.
The ersatz website, which appeared over the summer after the real CU Independent migrated to a new web address, bore the Independent’s name and logo. The only difference in their URLs is a “.com” ending instead of a “.org”. The Independent’s copycat was releasing a stream of poorly written stories on topics like celebrities, home improvement and fashion that Kerkhoff suspected were generated by AI.
It thrust Kerkhoff, 21, and the student journalists of the Independent into an increasingly common struggle for media outlets: dealing with copycat websites that impersonate reputable publishers to profit off web traffic with low quality, often AI-generated articles.
That’s a headache for larger news sites. But experts said the Independent’s case typified how AI-powered copycat websites can hit smaller, local publications without the means to fight back. While running the Independent and pursuing her studies, Kerkhoff has had to juggle petitioning state authorities, finding an attorney and starting a fundraiser to mount a legal challenge against the imposter website, which continues to churn out stories.
“It really feels so weirdly malicious,” Kerkhoff said.
AI has supercharged the work of content farms that churn out articles at scale to earn advertising money by siphoning traffic from established sites. Alexandra Bass, an attorney representing the CU Independent, said the practice of impersonating news websites has become more common since generative AI became widely available.
“Generative AI can allow bad actors to produce content at a rapid pace—potentially flooding the web with misinformation, and at times directly regurgitating the works of dedicated journalists,” Bass wrote in an email to The Washington Post. “AI can also aid bad actors in publishing content that looks and sounds like something a reader might see on a legitimate news site.”
The media research firm NewsGuard has identified over 2,000 AI-generated news sites as of October, which often feature heavy advertising and misleading or inaccurate stories. The sites often pick generic newspaper names to appear reliable, but it’s unusual for a bad actor to take over a web address that was recently used by a legitimate newspaper, said Sofia Rubinson, a senior editor at NewsGuard.
“This is like their dream,” she said.
The CU Independent, whose experience was first reported by the Denver Post, became vulnerable when it transitioned to a new website and web address, cuindependent.org, in 2024. The paper’s leaders weren’t able to deactivate its old website, cuindependent.com, because they’d lost track of who owned the domain, which dated back to the 2000s, according to former editor in chief Jessica Sachs.
The Independent’s old website eventually went offline after editors stopped paying WordPress to host it. Then, in July, it resurfaced. It looked similar to the Independent’s current website, and still linked to the newspaper’s social media accounts, but published what looked like AI slop. As far as students at the Independent could tell, another publisher had taken over the site.
“I looked at it, and obviously was shocked and horrified,” said Kerkhoff, the current editor in chief.
Efforts to contact the owners of the imposter Independent website were unsuccessful. The Independent’s old domain name sold for around $26,000 in April, according to records on NameBio, a website that tracks web address sales.
The copycat site’s articles, including “How many albums does Drake have?” and “Professional Movers in North Carolina for a Smooth and Secure Move,” are a far cry from the Independent’s reporting. Kerkhoff said it was galling that the site’s “About Us” page appears to claim it is the same organization, with “a long history” starting as a student newspaper before evolving into its current form.
“We still honor what CU Independent stood for: strong voices, independent thought, and stories that matter,” the site says.
Attempting to get the website taken down has turned into a months-long ordeal, Kerkhoff said. She was unable to contact its owners through emails listed on the site, who are registered under a proxy service that obscures their identity.
Kerkhoff said she also reported the website to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation’s business fraud unit but was told the state couldn’t investigate the issue unless the CU Independent proved its copycat was making money off the newspaper’s brand. (The bureau confirmed it had received a call from the Independent but declined to comment further.)
“It’s been a little bit of a cloud over things,” Kerkhoff said.“ … Not only was I stepping into my first couple months as editor in chief, but I was simultaneously needing to become an expert in these areas of media law and figure out what was going on.”
The Independent ultimately contacted Bass, the attorney now representing them, through the Student Press Law Center. Bass wrote to The Post that victims of an impersonation website can apply to regain control of a web domain by submitting a complaint to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, an international nonprofit that manages internet addresses.
Kerkhoff said the process costs around $1,500. The Independent, which is unaffiliated with the University of Colorado, has had to launch a fundraiser to file its complaint. In the meantime, the copycat Independent site continues to publish. It has changed its logo and no longer links to the Independent’s social media accounts, but continues to claim it’s the same newspaper.
Jonathan Gaston-Falk, an attorney with the Student Press Law Center who consulted with the Independent, said the newspaper’s experience could be the new reality for student journalists and those at other smaller publications as AI continues to crowd the internet.
“It’s frustrating because I think that a lot of these acts … are premised on the idea that student journalism somehow isn’t protected in the same way as professional media happens to be, and so their their rights are more easily run roughshod over,” Gaston-Falk said.
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