A freelance writer who worked for publishing and SEO company ClickOut Media has revealed how AI-written articles continued to appear under his name after he was made redundant.
Ben Touati said that the experience with the SEO firm (which buys publications, often for large sums, before replacing journalists with AI in order to earn money through casino links) felt like a “slap in the face.”
The articles appeared in the days after he left ClickOut’s German operation and still remain live online, but under a different person’s byline.
ClickOut Media said in an email: “We use AI-assisted content where appropriate in tandem with human checks and edits. We continue to evolve our AI agents to be more accurate and improve our human editorial processes.”
AI ‘reporters’ on ClickOut-owned sports sites Sportscasting, SheKicks and Football Blog produced error-strewn content – and the ClickOut-bought site Videogamer was removed from review aggregator Metacritic over a fraudulent review written by AI.
In many cases, ClickOut replaces human writers with obviously AI-powered reporters – some of whom still have the word ‘ChatGPT’ visible in the name of their byline images – but in the case of Touati, he himself lived on as an AI ghost.
Lifelone ambition to be a journalist fulfilled at Techopedia
Touati 48, lives in Stockholm, and had previously worked as a German and English teacher and in customer support, but had always enjoyed freelance writing.
He described his initial job at Clickout Media as the fulfilment of a lifelong dream to work full-time as a journalist.
Touati’s contract with the organisation began in January 2024, when ClickOut Media was still known as Finixio.
The organisation still trades under the name Finixio, registered in Britain, and Companies House filings show revenue of £40 million in 2024.
Touati said that he wrote articles initially for the site Techopedia, on topics including AI, crypto and general technology. The site appears to have been bought by Clickout Media in 2024.
He said: “I was actually super happy because it was a big deal for me. It was how I got started as a journalist, because before that I had been a copywriter for many things, among them iGaming. So it was a way for me to get out of iGaming. They gave me pretty much free rein from the start, I could write about what I wanted.”
But the site Techopedia got delisted from Google (Google penalises sites for so-called ‘parasite SEO’ where they use the authority of an existing site to boost articles on another topic, which in ClickOut’s case is almost always casino articles).
Touati said that he was not informed what the actual issues were (the site was penalised by Google in late 2024 for parasite SEO, recovered, but was then penalised again in December, at which point ClickOut abandoned it, making many staff redundant).
Touati said that his communications were through a chat group with a manager, who explained little but said that the site had been penalised for a ‘keyword issue’.
He said that a manager said: “We have so many assets, I’m just going to place you with something else. That’s when I started at Esports Insider.”
Resisted pressure to use AI to write articles
Touati had no knowledge of esports, but knew plenty about gaming, and the manager accepted him saying: “You’re the nerd in chief.”
In August 2025 Touati said the manager told him ClickOut had acquired Escapist magazine, which he described as “Even more your lane.”
Touati said: “I went full on, I even wrote articles about comic books, which was almost like a lifelong dream of mine. I got press passes for events, and all that kind of stuff.”
Touati said that managers constantly encouraged writers at the sites to use AI to write articles, with managers saying: “It’s almost impossible to get by without AI these days.”
Touati said he used it for research, but he never used it to write finished copy.
He knew that ClickOut were using AI writers extensively after controversy blew up in early 2026 over AI articles published on some of the websites, with Aftermath highlighting a videogame ‘review’ written by a reporter who did not exist.
Staff were shown a video on how to use AI-written articles and “humanise” them.
He said he wasn’t interested, as he wanted to write articles himself. He said: “I just left the video running and didn’t pay attention to it.”
In early 2026, managers told Touati that they had let multiple freelances go because there was not enough work and everyone had “upscaled” their productivity with AI.
A manager wrote to him saying that because Esports Insider had been de-indexed by Google and The Escapist barely made money, so he would have to let him go.
In March 2026, Touati lost his job. On the 26 May, Touati decided to take a look at the site, and found articles under his byline that were not written by him.
He said: “It was a real slap in the face.”
He said that “technical fingerprints” on the articles showed him they had all been written by AI – including strange tags that bore the hallmarks of AI.
He said: “The five articles were just like lazy, obviously slop, obviously there’s not a real person that is behind that.
“They were all published before working hours, so times ranged from like 5:39am to six something am, and it happened day after day after day, and then they stopped on the 29th of May.”
Touati filed a GDPR claim against ClickOut on the second of June for misuse of his personal information and they removed the byline for those articles which then reappeared under another writer.
He said the experience left him feeling “exploited.”
Touati describes management as being remote, and had rarely spoken to senior management at the company. He said he was paid by monthly invoice via the online payment platform Deel.
He said that many of the managers appeared to be based in Malta, and has now founded his own lifestyle website Popkulturist.
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