At the center of the story was the CEO of the refinery company, Texas businessman John Calce. We\u2019d spent weeks examining Calce \u2014 pulling old lawsuits, property records, corporate registry filings \u2014 and had pieced together a portrait of what appeared to be an obscure serial entrepreneur who\u2019d for years tried and failed to secure funding for his long-shot refinery project.<\/p>\n
Then, not long before our story was set to publish, we decided to do a scrub on a separate company he had incorporated called Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals.<\/p>\n
Pulling up\u00a0the company\u2019s website<\/a>, I felt a brief flash of panic: Had we somehow missed the existence of a major business owned by the man at the center of our next story?\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cFrom Houston to Rotterdam, Jurong to Fujairah. Our network connects the world\u2019s most vital energy markets with speed, safety, and precision bulk oil storage,\u201d announced the front page of the company\u2019s website.<\/p>\n Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals, per the website, had more than 850 employees and 28 million barrels of oil storage capacity across six global hubs. This was puzzling: Our reporting had led us to believe Calce was struggling to raise enough money for a single project in the US, not overseeing a massive, multinational oil storage corporation.\u00a0<\/p>\n Had we been wrong?\u00a0<\/p>\n We turned to Google to learn more about the company\u2019s top executives. Its CEO, Sarah Jenkins, had more than 20 years of experience at major energy firms. And its chief technology officer, David Chen, \u201cbuilt the company\u2019s proprietary inventory management portal and integrated AI-driven predictive maintenance systems,\u201d according to his bio. But we couldn\u2019t find any trace of either of them online. Chalk it up to common names?\u00a0<\/p>\n We then Googled one of the more distinct names: Vice President for Sustainability Dr. Sofia Rossi, who had \u201cspearheaded the \u2018Future Fuels\u2019 program, preparing assets for biofuels and hydrogen.\u201d But, again, nothing. The links to their LinkedIn profiles were dead.<\/p>\n When we searched the company\u2019s Texas phone numbers, we found the same numbers listed online for a Houston baklava caterer, a Dallas-area taxi service and an OB-GYN office.<\/p>\n We called the Texas numbers: dead. Then we tried the numbers for the company\u2019s facilities in the Netherlands, Singapore and China. Also dead.\u00a0<\/p>\n We were beginning to suspect this company did not actually exist, at least as described on its website.\u00a0<\/p>\n What was going on with this website? We looked at the source code and noticed an odd notation, \u201cThis feature isn\u2019t implemented yet, but don\u2019t worry! You can request it in your next prompt!\u201d<\/p>\n We checked the site\u2019s domain registration, and we had our (apparent) answer: It was created this year and traced back to a company called Hostinger that offers\u00a0an AI website builder<\/a>\u00a0for $2.99 per month. \u201cDescribe it, and AI builds it,\u201d its homepage says. \u201cAppear on Google and AI search automatically.\u201d<\/p>\n Indeed, Google\u2019s \u201cAI Overview\u201d search response, now thrust on users by default with more and more regularity, seemed to ratify the company\u2019s bona fides:<\/p>\n When I searched for an award the company claimed on its website to have won, the Google AI Overview said that \u201cRecent notable recipients include Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals, recognized for their rapid expansion in the independent oil and terminal operations sector.\u201d<\/p>\n Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals is\u00a0a real LLC<\/a>. But everything on its website \u2014 from its\u00a0history of the company<\/a> to its job postings to a\u00a0diversity and inclusion policy<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 appears to be fictional. But perhaps more troubling is that Google, the proprietor of the world\u2019s primary research tool, has rolled out AI Overviews that can indiscriminately take in fake material and authoritatively spit it back out as real.<\/p>\n In response to questions, a Google spokesperson said in a statement: \u201cAI Overviews are rooted in our core Search ranking systems, surfacing reliable and high-quality information for the vast majority of queries. For uncommon search terms like these, there might not be high quality information published that matches the query \u2014 and we use these examples to improve our search systems.\u201d<\/p>\n After we reached out to Hostinger, the company pulled down the site. \u201cAfter receiving your inquiry, we carried out an internal review. Based on the violations identified, we suspended the website and the account behind it in line with our Terms of Service,\u201d a spokesperson said in a statement.<\/p>\n What we encountered is a particular species of a larger problem that is beginning to be better understood. In April, The New York Times\u00a0reported on an analysis<\/a>\u00a0that found Google\u2019s AI Overviews were accurate approximately nine out of 10 times, noting that that added up to \u201ctens of millions of erroneous answers every hour\u201d given vast search volumes. (A Google spokesperson told the Times that the study has \u201cserious holes.\u201d The company has acknowledged that AI Overviews \u201ccan make mistakes.\u201d)\u00a0<\/p>\n A BBC reporter wrote a fictional article naming himself the best\u00a0tech journalist at eating hot dogs<\/a>, and Google\u2019s AI as well as ChatGPT quickly picked it up and parroted it back.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n And the source material for the AI Overviews also appears eminently gameable, even when not trafficking in actual fiction. \u201cIt Is Trivially Easy to Use Reddit to Manipulate AI Search, Research Suggests,\u201d ran\u00a0a recent headline<\/a>\u00a0in 404 Media.\u00a0<\/p>\n The mystery website ended up as just a single paragraph in our story. But the larger implication is obvious: Fakes, counterfeits and frauds that would have taken considerable effort to create just a few years ago can now be churned out pretty much instantly.<\/p>\n While preparing this piece, we reached out to Calce asking about the site. An attorney for his company, America First Refining, replied to us with a letter dated June 24 that the attorney sent to Hostinger. The attorney also addressed the letter to several email addresses listed on the Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals website.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI write to demand immediate removal from the brownsvilleenergyterminals.com website of all unauthorized references to America First\u2019s office address on your website,\u201d the letter said. \u201cAs you are aware, America First has no connection or affiliation with the brownsvilleenergyterminals.com website and has not authorized the use of its corporate address there.\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019m left with lingering questions about the website: What was it for? Was it put up by some malicious actor who simply found the company\u2019s LLC records and decided to create a website? Was it a test site that was mistakenly put online? Or could it have been designed for consumption by someone who was meant to think it was real?\u00a0<\/p>\n We don\u2019t know, and our emails to the press contact listed on the website,\u00a0media@brownsvilleenergyterminals.com, bounced back.<\/p>\n Joshua Kaplan<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Alex Mierjeski<\/a>\u00a0contributed reporting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This article was first published by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. 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