An AI-Generated Content Empire Is Spreading Fake Celebrity Images on Google

A website named after a legendary Hollywood magazine is churning out AI-generated content, surfacing prominently in Google results, and filling the web with fake celebrity photos. Looking into the site led Motherboard down a rabbit hole of websites using AI and a company run by an aspiring movie star that darkly promises to be “the future of news.” 

Over the weekend, the X account Fandomwire circulated a now-deleted post about actor John David Washington replacing Jonathan Majors as Kang the Conqueror in Marvel movies. But the photo wasn’t of the real Washington—it was an AI-generated picture of the actor. It’s easy to see what most likely happened: As of this writing, the fake photo of Washington is in the top rung of Google image search results for the actor.

“"Our social admin thought it was real as it was a top Google image search result. Something needs to be done about AI generated images using peoples' likenesses,’” Reilly Johnson, President of FandomWire told Motherboard.

Washington isn’t the only celebrity with AI-generated images appearing in Google results. In fact, many of them stem from the same source: a website called Motion Picture Magazine. Motherboard found AI-generated images from the site in searches for images of Bill Skarsgård, Pedro Pascal, Shannon Sharpe, and Natalie Zea. The site shares a name with a storied fan publication that covered the film industry from 1911 to 1977. This new incarnation, which appears to have no connection to the original, is full of nonsensical articles that appear to have been generated with the help of AI and are stuffed with ads, YouTube videos, and affiliate links. When searching for Motion Picture Magazine on Google, the top results are the Wikipedia page for the original magazine, an archive of its contents, and the new AI-generated publication. 

One example of apparent AI generation is an article about a fake star called “Saffron.” The article describes a fake film career before veering into describing saffron, the spice, and contains an Amazon affiliate link to buy saffron among numerous ads. 

A website using AI to squat on valuable virtual real estate is emblematic of an emerging issue online: human-made sources of information are at risk of being displaced, with potential revenue being vacuumed up by shoddy machine-generated content. A study published earlier this month showed AI-powered SEO tactics and spam are clogging up search engine results for product reviews, making them worse for everyone.

A Google spokesperson said in an email that using AI to generate content designed to game search results is a violation of its spam policy. The company employs automated systems to fight spam in search results, the spokesperson added, and implemented specific improvements as a result of the study.  

"We build our ranking systems to show the most helpful and relevant information for any query, and studies have consistently found Google to deliver the highest quality results among search engines,” the spokesperson said. “For these queries, it’s easy to find a range of relevant images from high quality sources. Our quality and spam-fighting systems are very effective, and when we find instances where low quality content is ranking highly, we build scalable solutions that improve the results not for just one search, but for a range of queries.”

Motion Picture Magazine is part of a larger operation called Loaded Media. The site bills itself as the “future of news. Boundless, bright, and beyond limits.” The website is full of AI-generated images backing up seemingly AI-generated text, all of it linking to each other like an eternal ouroboros. Like the Motion Picture Magazine site, it contains YouTube videos, advertisements, and Amazon affiliate links. It also features a gallery of a dozen different digital magazines covering topics ranging from the entertainment industry, to travel, to popular science. Those websites are also filled with apparently AI-generated content and images. 

The key person behind Loaded Media’s AI SEO empire appears to be Donavon Warren, an actor and producer living in Los Angeles. Warren’s claim to fame is his 2014 independent film Wheels, which has a trailer that must be seen to be believed. 

On social media, Warren claims to run Loaded Media, as well as a production company called Loaded Dice Films. Both claim to be headquartered at The Lot at Formosa, a storied Hollywood location that has served as the shooting location for numerous classics. Motherboard reached out to representatives at CIM Group, the company that owns The Lot, to confirm this, but did not receive a response. 

When contacted by Motherboard, Warren did not go into detail about Loaded Media’s SEO-juicing scheme, or comment on the fake news articles. Instead, he simply confirmed that the celeb images are created by AI.

“Yes, Loaded Media uses AI images, chosen for their artistic appeal over traditional stock footage. While not perfect in facial creation, AI technology is improving,” Warren told Motherboard in an email. “Humans are especially skilled at detecting irregularities in faces due to our advanced facial recognition capabilities, an evolutionary trait. This ability is so refined that even minor inconsistencies in AI-generated faces are easily spotted.”

Motion Picture Magazine, like all of the sites associated with Loaded Media, features a digital magazine that visitors can flip through. At a glance, the magazine seems legitimate. The most recent available issue is from July 2022 and features a cover for Thor: Love & Thunder. Some of the images appear to be real photos of celebrities and promotional material for movies. There’s even big advertisement spreads for jeans and perfume brands, like you’d find in a real magazine. But none of the articles are credited to an author, and the brands are fake. 

“We tried integrating AI in our magazines years ago, but the technology was not there yet,” Warren said.

Some of the articles on Loaded Media’s website are troubling. One bizarre, seemingly AI-generated article is titled “GAYPAGE SCANDAL: 5 SHOCKING REVELATIONS,” and claims to be about a scandal concerning the adult video chat site GayPage. The article doesn’t contain any “revelations,” and has almost no details on what this supposed “scandal” is about. “With the scandal’s details unfurling, the impact on the once-cherished gay sex stories was undeniable,” reads the abstract and tedious AI-generated text, which only makes brief mention of leaked nudes amidst paragraphs of nonsense. Motherboard could not find any other sources referring to an apparent scandal at GayPage online. 

The top story on Loaded Media’s economy section is about a tech entrepreneur and artist named Brandon Stine, who the site said had “an unyielding commitment to ethics and societal contributions.” In reality, Brandon Stine is the name of a man accused of murdering a Pennsylvania state trooper in 2023. Loaded Media’s glowing review of Stine is interlaced with YouTube clips of local news coverage of the alleged killing. An AI-generated image of a bearded and smiling Stine opens up a section about how he launched Stine Tech Solutions, a company that doesn’t exist,  above a YouTube thumbnail depicting a photograph of the PA state trooper Stine is accused of murdering.

“Loaded Media's goal is to be at the forefront of news and entertainment, leveraging technology that evolves more rapidly than we can sometimes anticipate,” Warren said. “I am sure you are well aware of how news and media are evolving.”

Tech companies and lawmakers are slowly catching up on the issue of fake AI images—at least when it comes to celebrities. As of this writing, no one can search for Taylor Swift on X, a move designed to prevent people from stumbling on the abundance of AI-generated pornography featuring Swift simulacra that have flooded the internet. Famous people are pissed and Congress is considering new legislation, such as the No AI FRAUD Act, which takes aim at non-consensual virtual reproductions. (That’s not to say that the proposed laws are without problems; the Electronic Frontier Foundation said the No AI FRAUD Act is overbroad and would “create way more problems than it solves.”)

There is at least one part of Loaded Media’s burgeoning empire that does not use AI. Motion Picture Magazine hosts an article chiefly designed to promote Warren and a film called Vampire Apocalypse that is supposedly in pre-production. The article gushes that Warren is “an actor known for his ambition and work ethic” who “has been working out for four hours a day to prepare for his leading role” in the film. 

The article is full of professional-looking photos of Warren which do not appear to be generated by AI, and features a link to a human photographer’s Instagram.

Update 2/15/24: This story has been updated with a comment from FandomWire.