Publisher Ran AI-Generated Articles Under Fired Journalist's Byline

Ben Touati lost his job at Clickout Media in March 2026. Two months later he discovered that new articles were still appearing under his byline, pieces he had never written. As Britain's Press Gazette and the US outlet Futurism reported, the texts had been produced by an AI system, and the company saw no problem with it for weeks, until Touati filed a formal complaint under GDPR (the EU's General Data Protection Regulation).

Five Articles He Never Wrote

Touati, a 48-year-old freelancer based in Stockholm, began working for the company in January 2024, when it was still called Finixio. He wrote about artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency and technology for Techopedia. When that site was penalized by Google for excessive search-engine optimization, he was moved to Esports Insider and later to The Escapist magazine. In March 2026, management told him he was being let go, citing Esports Insider's deindexing from Google as the reason.

A few weeks later, between May 26 and 29, five new pieces went up under his name. Touati had never written them. The articles were posted before 7 a.m. and carried hallmarks of automated publishing, including unusual tags in the page code typically associated with machine-generated content.

Those five articles were just lazy, obviously AI slop, obviously there's no real person behind them - Ben Touati, former Clickout Media freelancer

A Company Known for Parasite SEO

Clickout Media, registered in the UK and run by managers based in Malta, specializes in buying up existing tech and industry publications and then replacing human editors with AI-generated content that promotes affiliate links to online casinos. Google has repeatedly penalized the company's sites for this practice, known as parasite SEO. Techopedia was deindexed over it in late 2024, regained visibility, was hit again in December, and Clickout eventually stopped investing in the brand.

According to Touati, managers had long pushed staff to use AI in writing articles. He preferred to write his own material, limiting his use of AI tools to research rather than generating finished sentences. After he was let go, the company apparently decided his byline was still a useful label to publish machine-written content under.

GDPR as Leverage

Rather than fight the case in the press, Touati opted for a legal complaint. On June 2, 2026, he filed a formal GDPR submission, arguing that the company was using his personal data, his name and professional image, without consent to sign content he had not created. The pressure worked faster than a typical media dispute: Clickout Media removed his name from the articles, though the texts themselves stayed online, now credited to a different author.

A company spokesperson gave British media a statement that did not deny the use of AI, only offering assurances about editorial oversight.

We use AI-assisted content where appropriate, combined with human oversight and editing. We continue to develop our AI agents to make them more accurate, and we are improving our editorial processes - Clickout Media spokesperson

Not the First Such Incident

This isn't the first controversy over Clickout Media's practices. Previously, Videogamer, another site the company owns, published a review credited to a fictional journalist with an AI-generated profile photo. The byline even made it into the Metacritic database, from which it was later removed once the story broke. Touati's case shows the problem wasn't confined to invented identities, it extended to the names of real, former employees.

For Polish freelancers and newsrooms, the case is a meaningful signal. More and more publishers, including in Poland, are testing hybrid models that combine human work with AI-generated content. Touati's case shows that a journalist's own name can become an asset a publisher uses without their knowledge, if the contract or terms lack clear provisions protecting professional image rights. GDPR, which also applies in Poland, gives journalists in a similar situation real leverage, stronger than public criticism alone.

The Clickout Media case also fits a broader pattern of automation in digital media, where the line between AI editorial support and passing off a machine under a human signature is sometimes deliberately blurred. In Poland, the Urząd Ochrony Danych Osobowych (UODO, the national data protection authority) has not yet dealt with a similar case, but media law attorneys already point to GDPR as a possible path for journalists facing an analogous situation.

Sources: Journalist fired by Clickout Media saw robot reporter take over their byline (pressgazette.co.uk), Journalist Alarmed When He's Fired, But Company Keeps Posting AI Slop Under His Name (futurism.com), Zwolniony dziennikarz przeżywa szok, gdy firma publikuje pod jego nazwiskiem teksty wygenerowane przez AI (gry-online.pl)