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Several of the most prominent alt-weekly newspapers in the United States are running search-engine-optimized listicles about porn performers, which appear to be AI-generated, alongside their editorial content.
If you pull up the homepage for the Village Voice on your phone, for example, you’ll see reporting from freelancers—longtime columnist Michael Musto still files occasionally—as well as archival work from big-name former writers such as Greg Tate, the Pulitzer Prize–winning music critic. You’ll also see a tab on its drop-down menu labeled “OnlyFans.” Clicking on it pulls up a catalog of listicles ranking different types of pornographic performers by demographic, from “Turkish” to “incest” to “granny.” These blog posts link out to hundreds of different OnlyFans accounts and are presented as editorial work, largely without labels indicating they are advertisements or sponsored. [After publication, the Village Voice removed the OnlyFans tab from its navigation menu and took several of these articles offline.]
Similar content appears on the websites of LA Weekly, which is owned by Street Media, the same parent company as the Village Voice, as well as the St. Louis–based alt-weekly the Riverfront Times. Although there is a chance some of these posts could be written by human freelancers, some of the writing bears markers of AI slop.
According to AI detection startup Reality Defender, which scanned a sampling of these posts from the Village Voice, the content in the articles registers as having a “high probability” of containing AI-generated text.“We’re seeing an ever-increasing part of old media be reborn as AI-generated new media,” says Reality Defender cofounder and CTO Ali Shahriyari. “Unfortunately, this means way less informational and newsworthy content and more SEO-focused ‘slop’ that really just wastes people’s time and attention. Tracking these kinds of publications isn’t even part of our day to day, yet we’re seeing them pop up more and more.”
The majority of LA Weekly’s staff were offered buyouts in March 2024, while the Riverfront Times laid off its entire staff in May 2024 after it was sold by parent company Big Lou Holdings to an unnamed buyer. Chris Keating, the Riverfront Times’ former owner, says he is bound by a confidentiality agreement and cannot name the new buyer.
R.C. Baker, the Village Voice’s sole remaining editor (according to its masthead) says he is not involved with the OnlyFans posts, although it appears on the site as editorial content. “I handle only news and cultural reporting out of New York City. I have nothing to do with OnlyFans. That content is handled by a separate team that is based, I believe, in LA,” he told WIRED.
Likewise, former LA Weekly editor in chief Darrick Rainey says he, too, had nothing to do with the OnlyFans listicles when he worked there. Neither did his colleagues in editorial. “We weren’t happy about it at all, and we were absolutely not involved in putting it up,” he says.
Street Media owner Brian Calle did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment prior to publication. Several weeks after this article was published, though, Calle did respond, and claimed that the premise of the article was untrue. He also denied that AI was used to produce any of the articles WIRED found in its reporting. Calle was then asked to further clarify his responses, but he did not.
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Former employees are disturbed to see their archival work comingling with SEO porn slop. “It’s wrenching in so many ways,” says former Riverfront Times writer Danny Wicentowski. “Like watching a loved home get devoured by vines, or left to rot.”
This is a new twist in the grim growing world of SEO slop. WIRED has reported on a variety of defunct news and media outlets that have been resurrected by new owners and stuffed with AI-generated clickbait, from a small-town Iowa newspaper to the beloved feminist blog the Hairpin. In the case of the alt-weeklies and OnlyFans listicles, the clickbait has appeared alongside actual editorial content, both archival and new.
LA Weekly and the Village Voice are both owned by the same parent company, Street Media, which acquired the publications in 2017 and 2020, respectively, and some of their OnlyFans content is identical. Meanwhile, the Riverfront Times publishes its OnlyFans blogs under the byline “RFT staff.”
Daniela LaFave, an Austin-based SEO expert who is bylined on the majority of the Village Voice OnlyFans blog posts as well as some of the LA Weekly posts, confirmed to WIRED that she is the same person named as the author. She declined to answer whether she used AI tools to create the posts.
Another frequent byline on the Village Voice and LA Weekly posts, “Jasmine Ramer,” has published more than 900 articles primarily for these two outlets in 2023 and 2024 according to the public relations platform MuckRack. (Sample headlines: “The Best Fart Fetish Onlyfans Accounts of 2023” and “Top 10 Finnish OnlyFans & Hottest Finnish OnlyFans 2023.”) There is a profile on LinkedIn listed as a senior staff writer at LA Weekly for an Austria-based woman named Jasmine Ramer, but there is little other digital footprint for the writer. When Reality Defender analyzed the profile photo on Ramer’s LinkedIn account, it found it was likely AI-generated. There is also at least one other account using the same photo claiming to be a digital marketing executive in the UK. (WIRED did not receive a response when it asked Ramer for comment via LinkedIn.)
OnlyFans is an online porn behemoth, one which has spawned numerous cottage industries, like professional proxy chatters who impersonate the platform’s stars. There are marketing agencies devoted to promoting OnlyFans creators, and many social platforms from Reddit to X are swarmed with bots trying to entice potential customers. These efforts are known as “OnlyFans funnels.”
Risqué sex ads have played a major role in the rise and fall of some alt-weeklies. The founders of New Times Media—also known as Village Voice Media—which once owned the Village Voice, LA Weekly, and the Riverfront Times as well as other US-based alt-weeklies, created the classified website Backpage.com in 2004 to compete with Craigslist. It created a lucrative revenue stream, buoying many titles for years, but ginned up major controversy for hosting sex ads.
Vice President Kamala Harris, serving as California attorney general at the time, dubbed Backpage “the world’s top online brothel” in 2016 and arrested its founders and CEO, charging each with several felony counts of pimping. With this recent history in mind, the decision to lean into sexual advertorial is especially brash. (These charges were dismissed, though the founders have since been charged with various felonies including money laundering.)
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It may be that these alt-weeklies are creating these blog posts in an effort to drum up web traffic to their sites, which could in turn help boost digital ad sales. They may also be accepting money from the accounts or from representatives of the accounts promoted, which would mean the posts were unlabeled advertorial. “Online ads, print ads, they all dried up,” Rainey says. “But this OnlyFans stuff is there.”
“OnlyFans has no financial arrangement with these outlets,” an OnlyFans spokesperson who identified herself only as “Brixie” told WIRED via email.
“I think the creators paid to be included,” opines Luka Sek, SEO manager for an OnlyFans promotion company called Social Rise. Speaking generally about online OnlyFans articles, Sek believes these published articles would have been handled by a third-party, such as “an agency that handles multiple models, or someone doing the marketing for such agencies.”
Whatever the reason, it marks a grim new pit stop for declining media publications, one in which blatant SEO bait sits side by side with culturally valuable archival journalistic work and, in the case of the Village Voice, ongoing contemporary reportage.
Tricia Romano, a former Village Voice writer who recently published an oral history of the newspaper, The Freaks Came Out to Write, sees the apparent arrival of SEO slop as keeping with the recent deterioration of alt-weeklies. “This is the logical dystopian conclusion,” she says. “But who’s reading it?”
Correction: 9/4/2024, noon EDT: WIRED has corrected some of its reporting, including which newspapers and articles were flagged by Reality Defender and the departure of the LA Weekly's staff. WIRED has also clarified several details, including its reporting on the Village Voice's masthead, a quote from Luka Sek and his generalized knowledge of online OnlyFans content, and the legacy of New Times Media and its relationship with law enforcement. WIRED updated several aspects of its reporting post-publication, such as article counts and edits to the Village Voice's mobile navigation menu.
