An investigation found that Brown Brothers Media, which buys struggling news outlets such as Veg Out, Space Daily, and Direct Message News, replaced laid-off writers with generative AI and published under more than 50 fabricated journalist personas with invented credentials. One fictitious author was presented as a former NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer with fifteen years of experience, and the network reportedly generated tens of thousands of AI-written articles across its sites. The company said it stopped the practice in May 2026, removed or corrected the affected articles, and adopted network-wide editorial standards.