{"id":10317,"date":"2026-04-17T17:19:07","date_gmt":"2026-04-17T17:19:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/national-today-ai-plagiarizing\/"},"modified":"2026-04-17T17:19:07","modified_gmt":"2026-04-17T17:19:07","slug":"national-today-ai-plagiarizing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/national-today-ai-plagiarizing\/","title":{"rendered":"A Prominent PR Firm Is Running a Fake News Site That\u2019s Plagiarizing Original Journalism at Incredible Scale"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

On Tuesday evening, we published an original interview<\/a> with a researcher who had recently coauthored an intriguing study about the effects of AI on users\u2019 cognition.<\/p>\n

A news site called National Today<\/em> quickly sprang into action: by ten o\u2019clock that night, it had published a piece<\/a> that was obviously a reworded version of our story, including a direct quote from the interview we\u2019d conducted. But instead of crediting us as the source of the information, as would be conventional, National Today<\/em> made no mention of Futurism<\/em>, and didn\u2019t even link to our article. Instead, it presented the reporting as if it were the original source.<\/p>\n

In other words, the National Today <\/em>piece \u2014 which bears no byline \u2014 is blatant plagiarism. And this isn\u2019t the first time this has happened.<\/p>\n

Last week, for example, National Today <\/em>ran a story about a controversial GLP-1 marketer called Medvi. It was obvious that National Today <\/em>ripped us off, because it\u2019d again stolen a quote<\/a> we\u2019d obtained from an expert while reporting<\/a>,\u00a0and had again failed to mention us or link to our work. Before that, it published a dupe<\/a> of a Futurism <\/em>blog<\/a> about a realtor who accidentally posted a real estate listing that included an AI-generated demon crawling out of a mirror, also without giving us any credit.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re not the only target. Once we started looking into National Today<\/em>, we realized that it\u2019s doing the same thing to countless other publications, ranging from top newspapers to local newsrooms across the country: stealing their original reporting and using it to publish a torrent of what appear to clearly be AI-generated articles, complete with bizarre errors and hallucinations. The scope is immense. We tried to count how many it published in a single day, but lost count around 300.<\/p>\n

The site\u2019s theft is blatant. In a single article<\/a> it published this week about writer and actress Lena Dunham, National Today<\/em>\u00a0plagiarized direct quotes from three separate interviews Dunham gave to prominent outlets \u2014 The New York Times<\/a><\/em>, Vanity Fair<\/a><\/em>, and The Guardian<\/a><\/em> \u2014 without attributing any of them.<\/p>\n

In a particularly ghoulish example, last week National Today <\/em>stole the work of Mellie Valencia, a reporter at the East Texas broadcaster KTRE<\/em> who had reported out a heartbreaking story<\/a> about a local mother whose 10-year-old daughter tragically passed away from a rare brain tumor in March. Despite the deeply sensitive nature of the reporting, National Today <\/em>still spat out a plagiarized copy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is very upsetting to see,\u201d Valencia told Futurism<\/em>, adding that a \u201clot of leg work was put into the story and real human connections were made with the family \u2014 and to see it pulled and replicated\u2026 is sad.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMy hope is that since KTRE<\/em> is one of the only stations covering this area,\u201d Valencia continued, \u201cpeople will head to our website instead of other websites to get the most up to date information.\u201d<\/p>\n

Others have noticed National Today\u2019s <\/em>theft. While looking into this story, we discovered that earlier this week, a writer at the Humboldt Country, California-focused outlet Lost Coast Outpost<\/em> named Ryan Burns had penned a devastating blog<\/a> calling out National Today <\/em>for ripping off stories by his employer and its peers in the area.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Lost Coast Outpost<\/em>\u2018s content has likewise been stolen and rewritten, sans credit, by these soulless algorithms and their douchebag creators,\u201d Burns wrote in the piece.<\/p>\n

National Today<\/em> publishes this deluge of plagiarized material in dozens of sections on its site that feature local-sounding titles \u2014 like NYC Today<\/em>, Sacramento Today<\/em>, Cleveland Today<\/em>, and Harrisburg Today<\/em> \u2014 and which are designed in a way that makes it look them look a local news sites. We found both Google Search and Google News surfacing the site\u2019s pilfered content, where it often appeared alongside local reporting. <\/p>\n

\"A<\/figure>\n

After we reached out to Google with questions about this story, most National Today<\/em> results disappeared from both Google Search and Google News.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur policies prohibit producing content at scale for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings,\u201d the company said in a statement. \u201cWhile we don\u2019t comment on spam penalties against individual sites, we take appropriate action when we identify violations of our policies. We go to great lengths to fight webspam in our search results, and 99 percent of Search visits are spam free.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition to the incredible speed at which it churns out all this slop, National Today <\/em>is full of comically terrible errors that make it difficult to believe that any human is even skimming its articles before publication.<\/p>\n

One issue is that the AI generating all the articles often seems to get confused and replace real people\u2019s names with \u201cJane Doe.\u201d In one recent piece, National Today <\/em>reported<\/a> that a NASA astronaut aboard Artemis 2 named \u201cJohn Doe\u201d had dedicated a Moon crater to his deceased wife, \u201cJane Doe.\u201d In reality, the astronaut\u2019s name is Reid Wiseman<\/a> and his wife, who passed away in 2020, was Carroll Wiseman.<\/p>\n

Another recent National Today<\/em> article<\/a>, about a grisly sex crime in Burlington, Vermont, attributes a quote to a \u201cChief Jane Doe.\u201d But there is no Chief Jane Doe in Burlington; the name of the actual police chief<\/a> there is Shawn Burke. More of its slop articles identify<\/a> \u201cJane Doe\u201d as a \u201cSecurities Exchange Commission official\u201d (there is no SEC official named Jane Doe) and as \u201cGovernor of Iowa\u201d (the current governor<\/a> of Iowa is named Kim Reynolds.)<\/p>\n

National Today <\/em>even goes as far as to misquote the Pope. In one recent article<\/a> about the ongoing rift between president Donald Trump and Pope Leo XIV, National Today<\/em> claims that, in response to Trump posting a widely-decried AI-generated image of himself as a Jesus Christ figure on his truth social account, the Pontiff remarked that \u201cJesus probably would not be on board with that.\u201d There\u2019s no evidence that Pope Leo ever said said that, or anything even close.<\/p>\n

Sometimes the site\u2019s AI seems to get stuck on a certain quote, repeatedly jamming it into articles where it makes no sense. One quote we found \u2014 \u201cWe must not let individuals continue to damage private property in San Francisco,\u201d which appears to be wholly fabricated \u2014 is repeated in a slew of stories that make mention of neither crime nor San Francisco, such as one about the Dallas Cowboys<\/a>, another about a biotech company in the Boston area<\/a>, and yet another about New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani hosting a tax day event<\/a>.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most surprising thing about National Today <\/em>is that it isn\u2019t run by some fly-by-night content\u00a0mill. Instead, it\u2019s the project by the TOP Agency, a flashy branding and public relations agency that claims to have worked with nationally-known companies including Microsoft, Intel, Budweiser, Universal Music Group, US Bank and Discover Card. On LinkedIn, its CEO Benjamin Kaplan describes it as the \u201cfastest growing viral publicity company in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kaplan is even listed as an author on National Today<\/em>,\u00a0where his name is attached to numerous clearly plagiarized stories. One National Today <\/a><\/em>story<\/a> carrying his byline, about San Francisco public health workers pushing back against clinic closures, lifts quotes directly from reporting<\/a> by the independent outlet Mission Local<\/em>. Another of Kaplan\u2019s stories<\/a> lifts wording directly from an interview by the Commonwealth Club<\/a>. Neither give any credit.<\/p>\n

Last week, we found while reporting this story, a journalist named Robert Cox caught National Today<\/em><\/a> <\/em>ripping off a local crime story he wrote for Talk of the Sound<\/em>, a local outlet serving New Rochelle, New York.<\/p>\n

\u201cOver the course of a week, I put in significant original work\u2026 to produce a timely, accurate article that set the stage for ongoing reporting as the case moves toward trial or a possible plea deal,\u201d Cox wrote of the theft, adding that the National Today <\/em>dupe he discovered \u201cadds no independent sourcing, no new facts, and no original analysis.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is also no attribution, no link, and no credit given to Talk of the Sound<\/em> or to my reporting,\u201d he wrote.\u00a0\u201cJust Kaplan passing off my work as his own. How is this not copyright infringement and theft of my original copyrighted work?\u201d<\/p>\n

According to a description on TOP\u2019s site, National Today <\/em>exists to help brands \u201cCreate Ownable Viral Moments for your brand\u201d and \u201creach 10M consumers, 100K media outlets, and 10K influencers across traditional, digital, and social media.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, TOP seems to be saying, National Today <\/em>is a marketing vehicle for its clients \u2014 made possible by the theft of local journalism on an almost incomprehensible scale.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to say whether to take this claim at face value \u2014 what good would it do to TOP\u2019s clients to be featured in plagiarized slop articles on a little-known site? But it\u2019s hard to believe anyone would go to the work of generating untold thousands of the fake news pieces without some scheme to make money.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/figure>\n

It\u2019s not clear whether TOP built National Today<\/em> from scratch, or acquired an existing site and transformed it into a firehose of pilfered, error-ridden fake local journalism. (Its website includes an apocryphal-sounding account<\/a> of its founding that describes its mission as \u201cspreading the love to all.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Historically, though, the site appears to have been dedicated to content about holidays. Its main landing page still hosts a daily calendar of holidays that range from the very serious to completely ridiculous; April 16 alone, according to National Today<\/em>, is the \u201cDay of the Mushroom,\u201d \u201cSave the Elephant Day,\u201d and \u201cNational Joseph Day,\u201d the latter of which appears to simply be a day of celebration for all guys named Joseph.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe keep track of fun holidays and special moments on the cultural calendar,\u201d reads National Today<\/em>\u2018s \u201cabout\u201d page, \u201cgiving you exciting activities, deals, local events, brand promotions, and other exciting ways to celebrate.\u201d<\/p>\n

While National Today<\/em> has been around since at least 2017, its flood of plagiarized news slop appears to be a much more recent addition. Archived versions of the site show the news content starting to crop up around January 2026.<\/p>\n

We sent multiple emails to National Today <\/em>and TOP requesting comment for this story. We haven\u2019t heard back.<\/p>\n

We did, however, learn from National Today<\/em><\/a> that February 17 is \u201cPrevent Plagiarism Day.\u201d Unfortunately, it seems like we\u2019ll have to wait until next year to celebrate.<\/p>\n

More on AI and the web:<\/strong> Analysis Finds That Google\u2019s AI Overviews Are Providing Misinformation at a Scale Possibly Unprecedented in the History of Human Civilization<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

The post A Prominent PR Firm Is Running a Fake News Site That\u2019s Plagiarizing Original Journalism at Incredible Scale<\/a> appeared first on Futurism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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