One of The Hairpin’s most well-known messages features a person laughing by herself while eating salad.

• A well-known independent women’s attention website called The Hairpin operated from 2010 to 2018.
• When the site owners failed to maintain it in time, something happened, and a DJ ended up purchasing it.
• The site now has new backlinks content created by AI, and men’s titles have taken the place of the old bylines.

With the classic article “Women laughing alone with salads,” the little women’s interest blog The Hairpin made headlines in the visual journalism industry in 2011.

Even though it was just a collection of stock photos of women eating dish, it conveyed more information about culture and women than tens of thousands of words.

That blog post is still in existence, but instead of Edith Zimmerman’s headline, it claims to have been written by “James Nolen” (who almost certainly does not exist) and contains a ton of AI-written words about how “women laughing alone with dish” is an internet sensation and image.

There is a creepy deadness across the webpage as another AI-generated articles and weird things appear.

Wired deduced the cause of the incident: The website for “thehairpin.” com” was purchased by someone who snatches up just expired domains to convert them into monster places that you take ad revenue and was unintentionally no renewed by its users.

According to Kate Knibbs:

I located The Hairpin’s new landlord, a Bosnian DJ by the name of Neboja Vujinovi, in an effort to comprehend the future of advertising. He acknowledges that the majority of the new content on The Hairpin are in fact AI-generated and claims the site is only the most recent name in his firm of more than 2,000 websites. He claims,” I almost always purchase novel sites.”

The Hairpin appealed to Vujinovi because of its “great status and excellent links,” which he values because they aid in Google ranking. It’s a typical occurrence now on the internet. In the future, he intends to “add all past writers” back to the website. However, his top priority is creating more fresh algorithm-generated material.

When BI sent a request for comment via email to the address listed on the site, Vujo did n’t respond right away.

Jia Tolentino, Anne Helen Petersen, and Jazmine Hughes all started writing at The Hairpin, a companion website to The Awl, before it shut down in 2018. However, the web and libraries were still active.

It’s important to keep in mind that, despite the site name appearing to have been purchased fairly when the renewal expired, the new owner usually has no equity or rights over any of the content on the website.

The Awl Network, which published The Hairpin, co-founded Choire Sicha, informed Business Insider that a text has been sent to the new owner of the domain.

How Vujo was able to get The Hairpin’s material is unclear. According to Sicha, they are also attempting to solve the problem.

He informed Business Insider that “this object or people did not purchase The Hairpin.” “They were given a domain name.” That does not imply that they have a right to content that has already been posted there. “”