September 21, 2026
A "NASA engineer" byline proves nothing: Space Daily invented an author for AI texts
Pangram's detector tested 30 recent articles from the network that owns Space Daily: all 30 were machine-generated.
Dr. Catherine Chen spent 15 years at NASA JPL building autonomous systems for deep space. She does not exist.
Space Daily published space stories under that byline. The NASA website has no mention of Catherine Chen, and the author profile has been removed.
It also published work by “Dr. James Whitfield,” presented as an ESA aerospace medicine researcher. ESA told Futurism: “James Whitfield does not work at the European Space Agency, and our records do not indicate that he has ever worked here before.”
Space Daily has been publishing for more than 30 years and draws around 10 million page views a month. Credentials in a byline no longer guarantee anything: they are printed just as easily as the text itself.
Pangram checked 30 recent articles from the Brown Brothers Media network, which owns Space Daily, and rated all 30 as entirely AI-generated. The detector classified a separate Space Daily article as machine-written, with no signs of human editing.
There used to be an editorial team. In December 2023, the network listed more than 60 active authors; by May 2024, about 40 remained; by August, about 20; by December, 12. The company acquired sites at the opposite pace: from fewer than ten in 2023 to at least 24 in 2025.
Brown Brothers Media acknowledged in a statement to Futurism: “Until May 2026, our publications used bylines that did not correspond to real people, and some of these biographies included inaccurate credentials.” After Futurism's first questions in May, the network erased more than 50 fictional author profiles and thousands of articles attributed to them.
What to use for checks. Futurism published a list of all 43 outlets in the network, with their domains, including spacedaily.com, marsdaily.com, and nuclearpowerdaily.com. The Pangram detector used to check the articles offers 2000 words a day for free, is available as a browser extension, and integrates with Google Docs.
Paid plans start at $20 a month for 300 000 words.
On its website, Brown Brothers Media promises named editors with accountability and corrections with public dates. It does not mention AI.
The site is still publishing: removing fifty profiles did not stop the content mill.
