Pearson Airport warns public about A.I.-generated stories providing false info about flight operations

Canada’s largest airport is warning passengers to be careful about what they click on. Officials at Toronto Pearson Airport say artificial-intelligence (A.I.) generated articles are giving false and misleading information about flight operations.

“In the last few months, we’ve seen this really ramp up,” said Sean Davidson, Pearson Airport spokesperson. 

On first glance, the headlines from multiple travel-centric websites appear legitimate. But take a closer look, and you’ll find fake headlines like this one posted just last week: “I.T. Outage Triggers Major Flight Chaos Across Canada.”

It’s a growing problem for Pearson.

“Some ‘authors’ on these websites (are) writing up to 100 articles a day, so it’s clearly done by A.I.,” Davidson adds. “And we’re concerned about it because we don’t want passengers to either have to show up when it’s not necessary or maybe they’re cancelling or rebooking a flight because they’re concerned about what’s going on at the airport.” 

Davidson says the airport has attempted to contact these websites multiple times to take down the inaccurate information, but to no avail.

He says it’s an issue impacting airports across North America.

Cybersecurity expert Ritesh Kotak says the bogus content can generate very real profits for the people behind it.

“The way these websites make money is if they’re able to generate traffic, if they’re able to get people to click on things, then guess what? They can sell advertising space on it. And by selling that advertising space, they’re able to generate revenue. And the more people that go to it, the more clicks they get, the more money that puts into their bank accounts.”

Another cybersecurity expert CityNews spoke with says the sites also engage in data collection and can pose serious security risks.

“These sites collect information from us, data, and that information can be used in all sorts of ways against us as well,” warned Carmi Levy. “Sites like this have also been associated with ransomware, malware attacks.”

“There are many ways this can go, none of them are in consumers’ best interest.”

Toronto Pearson Airport provided CityNews with the following list of sites it says are producing fake, A.I.-generated content:

• TheTraveler.org
• Toronto Digest
• Travel and Tour World
• NomadLawyer
• Travel Tourister

Travel and Tour World refuted the airport’s allegations, telling CityNews that its website does not rely on automated AI bots to generate flight status or operational content about the airport.

“Our flight disruption reporting is a form of data-driven journalism. We rely on real-time data aggregated from industry-standard tracking platforms, specifically FlightAware. To ensure absolute data integrity, our human editorial desk cross-checks these metrics and securely archives timestamped screenshots of the live feeds for every article published,” the organization said in a statement.

“Characterizing our platform as an unverified AI network is factually incorrect and defamatory to our human editorial team,” they added.

Travel and Tour World pointed out that they filed a copyright infringement notice against one of the other platforms, TheTraveler.org, for what it calls “unauthorized AI bot scraping,” and received an interim injunction restraining them from using their travel content.

A statement from Toronto Digest acknowledges that the source of a post referenced by GTAA has been removed along with related feeds, as it did not meet their sourcing standards.

“We agree with GTAA that inaccurate operational information hurts travellers,” they said. “Toronto Digest will not publish content about Toronto Pearson Airport operations going forward.”

CityNews reached out to the other websites for comment, but had yet to receive a response.

Experts say online users need to be more vigilant in the age of A.I. and take every step to ensure what they’re reading is legitimate.

In this case, that means go straight to the source — either your airline’s official webpage or social media channel, or Pearson’s.