Ben Touati started writing for ClickOut Media in early 2024, contributing to their network of tech and gaming publications — Techopedia, iGaming sites, Esports Insider. The Stockholm-based freelance writer was good at what he did. He built a professional reputation, one byline at a time.

From the beginning, there was pressure to use AI tools. Managers told staff repeatedly: "It's almost impossible to get by without AI these days." They showed employees training videos on how to create and "humanize" AI-written content. Touati refused to watch. "I just left the video running and didn't pay attention to it," he said.

In early 2026, the axe fell. Managers told Touati and several other freelancers they were being let go. The reason: there wasn't enough work anymore, because everyone had "upscaled" their productivity with AI. His specific dismissal was tied to Esports Insider being de-indexed by Google — but the writing was on the wall. Human writers were becoming overhead.

Touati moved on. Or tried to. Then, in late May, he noticed something strange. Articles were still appearing under his name on the site. Five of them, published after he'd been fired. And they weren't his work.

"The five articles were just like lazy, obviously slop — obviously there's not a real person that is behind that," Touati told Press Gazette. The AI-generated pieces fell far below the standards he'd maintained for his own work. They were generic, formulaic, the kind of content you can spot immediately if you know what to look for.

The insult wasn't just that he'd been replaced by an AI. It was that the company was still using his name — his professional identity, his reputation — to publish inferior content without his knowledge or consent. Someone reading those articles would think Ben Touati had written them. They'd judge his work by the output of a machine.

Touati didn't just get angry. He got strategic. He filed a claim under the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation, arguing that ClickOut was misusing his personal information — his name, his professional identity — without consent.

It worked. The company removed his byline from all five articles. They now appear under a different writer's name.

The case is a small but important victory for writers in the AI era. ClickOut already had a history of AI content scandals — earlier in 2026, its Videogamer site was found to have a completely fabricated AI journalist, and other acquired outlets featured fake author profiles with AI-generated photos. Using a real writer's byline after firing them was a new low.

For Touati, the GDPR win was satisfying but bittersweet. His byline is safe now, but his career — like so many writers — faces an uncertain future as publishers increasingly choose speed and cost over the human craft of writing. "It's a slap in the face," he said, "to work somewhere for years, build a reputation, and then find out they're putting your name on garbage just to keep the content machine running."