Space Daily used a fictional NASA engineer to publish AI sludge

A publication turned into a content mill

Space Daily has operated for more than three decades. After Brown Brothers Media acquired it, Futurism reported, the publication became difficult to recognize: a high-volume operation producing misleading, poorly checked material with AI.

The site receives about 10 million page views a month. That figure would look impressive on its own. In this case, it also shows the scale at which invented authority could be used to distribute generated content.

The names were part of the machinery

Space Daily presented at least two authors as established aerospace professionals:

Futurism confirmed that neither Chen nor Whitfield exists. Brown Brothers Media created the characters so that large volumes of material could appear under names resembling the bylines of genuine experts.

The European Space Agency said James Whitfield does not currently work there and is not listed among its former employees. NASA declined to comment, but its website contains no mention of Katherine Chen.

The cleanup removed more than bad articles

After Futurism began investigating Brown Brothers Media, the company started deleting articles and profiles, including those belonging to Chen and Whitfield.

Brown Brothers Media later acknowledged that, until May 2026, its publications had used author names that did not correspond to real people. Some biographies also included professional achievements that did not exist. The company called this a mistake, said it stopped publishing under those names in May, and said it had begun deleting or correcting older material. It also introduced editorial standards across its network and individual sites. The review is continuing, according to the company.

The remaining bylines are less specific. Space Daily now publishes under labels such as “Space Daily editorial” and “mission notes.” Some articles identify a Brown Brothers Media founder, an editor, or a group of authors as the editor or contributor.

The output still looks machine-made

The site’s front page recently featured an awkward article about the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft encountering comet 67P, an event that happened more than ten years ago. Futurism suggested that Space Daily was revisiting it to attract clicks and fill Google search results with material aimed at algorithms.

Another article carried this headline:

“Gas stream one trillion miles long falling onto triple star aligns with the outermost of three tilted rings to within three degrees.”

The article itself was nearly impossible to understand, combining references to “angles,” “fitted numbers,” and “discrepancies.” Pangram determined that it was entirely AI-generated and showed no signs of human editing.

That detail changes the nature of the story. The problem is not simply that an AI system produced weak science writing. The site attached that writing first to fictional specialists, then to vague editorial labels, making the byline itself part of the content-generation pipeline. What I would want to know is how much of the network’s traffic depended on those invented signals of expertise.

The “living proxy” behind the byline

The article was published under the name Chris Jeremiah. He appears to be what Futurism calls a “living proxy”: a real person whose name Brown Brothers Media assigns to fully generated work.

Under that byline, the site published material about astrophysics and cuneiform clay tablets. Chris Jeremiah is also listed as an editor of VegOut and writes for The Vessel about beluga whales in Canada facing euthanasia. Both publications are also Brown Brothers Media AI-content operations.

Chris Jeremiah may exist in reality. But based on the pattern, his editorial authority appears no more meaningful than that of the fictional doctors whose profiles the company removed. The company can change the labels; the unresolved problem is whether any accountable editor is standing behind the words.