Man Confused by AI-Generated Reports That He's Dead [View all]

[highplainsdem]

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-generated-dead

You know the old adage “don’t believe everything you see on the internet”? In the age of AI, it’s never been more relevant.

Late in December, Denver Bronco’s beat writer Cody Roark was surprised to learn he was dead, leaving behind a 5 year old child. As far as he knew, he had never fathered a child, and was very much still alive.

Yet that’s not what the post on Facebook claimed. There, an image shared by the page “Wild Horse Warriors” featured an AI generated image of the sports journalist holding a child, with a big “RIP” stitched across it.

Though the Facebook page has since been taken down, the Denver Post reports that it described Roark as a “Denver Broncos analyst” who’d “dedicated over a decade to protecting the team,” before passing away due to a “heartbreaking domestic violence incident.”

-snip-

More at the link.

And more from the Denver Post:

https://www.denverpost.com/2026/01/15/broncos-reporter-ai-facebook-post-death/

-snip-

Suddenly, he became a virtual pawn in the scheme of something much greater. Since its creation in November, the account “Wild Horse Warriors” posted mostly fake Broncos content four times a day. It claimed that Courtland Sutton refused to wear an LGBTQ+-supporting armband during a game (this didn’t happen). And that Sean Payton had his sixth child on Christmas (he has two). Many came laced with clearly fake images.

-snipping paragraphs including one about Meta removing the account-

That network, however, still lives. “Wild Horse Warriors” followed a string of similar accounts that followed other accounts that post fake shock-value Broncos content, each gaining thousands of followers and generating thousands of engagements. Those still exist. And there’s a greater chain of similar accounts targeted toward other fanbases: there’s the “Midway Bears,” and “Here We Go Steelers,” and “Chiefs Kingdom Forever.” The pathways splinter and seep into every corner of the NFL landscape, and beyond.

-snip-

The main purpose? Money. This is a type of fraud, experts told The Post. Virtually every fake post includes a link — Roark’s heads to abcnews.besttopixs.com — that includes several ad pop-ups. Every impression on such websites can generate a shred of revenue. Maybe such posts don’t need to hit a million clicks, said Brian Keegan, a professor at CU who researches the dynamics of large-scale online communication. But a thousand clicks on a variety of posts spread across a web of accounts, Keegan said, can make for a profitable operation.

There’s also the potential that such accounts are directly malicious. V.S. Subrahmanian, a professor at Northwestern and an international expert on AI’s intersection with security issues, noted that visiting such links could automatically download cookies that can access one’s banking or personal information.

-snip-

Zuckerberg and others at Meta know exactly how harmful these AI fake news accounts are. They allow them on Facebook anyway, until one gets too much unfavorable media attention, because they get a lot of clicks and keep gullible people engaged and on Facebook longer.