How an AI-generated Facebook post claimed a Broncos reporter died

On the morning of Dec. 28, 31-year-old Cody Roark poured himself an espresso, sat on the couch with his phone, and learned that he was dead.

Some two hours away in Hugo, Roark’s coworker Doug Ottewill was helping his 79-year-old mother Helen set up a new iPad he’d bought her for Christmas. Ottewill showed her how to log into Facebook. Helen scrolled. And then came across a graphic of a young man overlayed with a large R.I.P. insignia.

“Oh, this is sad,” Helen told her son. “Do you know this guy?”

The post, from an account labeled “Wild Horse Warriors” with over 6,200 followers and no profile picture, reported the death of a “Denver Broncos analyst” who’d “dedicated over a decade to protecting the team” and had left behind a 5-year-old child, following a heartbreaking domestic violence incident.” It did not mention a name. But it had a picture.

“That’s Cody,” Ottewill said.

Ottweill texted Roark, who reports on the Broncos for local news outlet Mile High Sports, to ask if he was OK. Roark had just steamed some milk. He was very much alive. And he was befuddled. Within that post was a photo of him holding a child, smiling, like a flashback in an episode of “Dateline.”

Roark does not have a child.

“It was just one of those things you hate seeing,” Roark said a week later, sitting in the lobby of the Broncos’ practice facility. “Just doesn’t make sense. I always thought, like — usually you see that happen to, like, high-profile celebrities.

“For that to happen to me was just really weird,” he mused. “Very, very weird.”

In the moments and days to come, Roark concluded that this was an AI-generated post because no such image exists of him smiling while holding a child. He’s still befuddled. He is a well-known figure in the Broncos’ fanbase, a former football coach and PE teacher who’s made a career in the Denver media market and has over 21,000 followers on X. But he would never view himself as an “important enough figure” for such a creation, as Roark put it.

Suddenly, he became a virtual pawn in the scheme of something much greater. Since its creation in November, the account “Wild Horse Warriors” posted mostly fake Broncos content four times a day. It claimed that Courtland Sutton refused to wear an LGBTQ+-supporting armband during a game (this didn’t happen). And that Sean Payton had his sixth child on Christmas (he has two). Many came laced with clearly fake images.

It’s harmless — until it isn’t. That post of Roark drew over 120 reactions. Many posts draw many more.

“Wild Horse Warriors” is now dead. After JS reached out to Meta for comment, it removed the Facebook page and “other connected pages,” the company said, for violating policies around inauthentic behavior.

“Inauthentic Behavior refers to a variety of complex forms of deception, performed by a network of inauthentic assets controlled by the same individual or individuals, with the goal of deceiving Meta or our community or to evade enforcement under the Community Standards,” Meta’s policy reads, as a spokesperson provided.

That network, however, still lives. “Wild Horse Warriors” followed a string of similar accounts that followed other accounts that post fake shock-value Broncos content, each gaining thousands of followers and generating thousands of engagements. Those still exist. And there’s a greater chain of similar accounts targeted toward other fanbases: there’s the “Midway Bears,” and “Here We Go Steelers,” and “Chiefs Kingdom Forever.” The pathways splinter and seep into every corner of the NFL landscape, and beyond.

Several experts in the field of AI and social-media disinformation noted to The Post that artificial intelligence, in a vacuum, is not the problem. The problem, they said, is how easy AI can be utilized to set up widespread networks of misinformation — trickling all the way down to a Broncos reporter who is decidedly not dead.

And Roark identified the danger himself, in his own attempts to rationalize why machine learning would single out him, of all people.

“I think it creates only clicks, but it also creates this disconnect where people that don’t know, that may not be on other social medias … a lot of older people are there on Facebook,” Roark said. “They believe it.

“And it spreads like wildfire.”

Inside a potential click-farm network

Bo Nix donating $5 million to a dog rescue. Nameless cheerleaders dying. The team hiring homeless workers. John Elway facing unexpected health complications.

All such Broncos content has flooded Facebook feeds. All of it’s fake, from an ever-growing branch of accounts that use the same verbiage and link to barely comprehensible mock news stories. Much of it explodes, though; one false post of Nix refusing to wear a rainbow armband has over 2,300 reactions. One account, “Blue & Orange Pride,” posted in late December that Broncos Hall of Fame linebacker Randy Gradishar died, spawning a wave of hundreds of heartfelt comments and reactions.

“I’ve seen the fake posts, reported them to the Broncos Alumni rep,” Gradishar — who is very much alive — texted JS Friday. “That’s all I have to say.”

This fall, as longtime Broncos radio play-by-play man Dave Logan was scrolling his Facebook reels, he came across a post that former Denver MVP running back Terrell Davis was battling throat cancer.

“Wait a minute,” Logan thought to himself. “I know Terrell. This can’t be true.”

And then he thought again.

“Wait a minute. Is this actually true?”

It wasn’t, of course. Logan confirmed as much with a couple of Davis’ friends.

Months later, The Post showed Logan a post from “Wild Horse Warriors” that claimed the longtime announcer — labeled in the text as the “voice of the Patriots” — was facing a serious vocal-cord illness.

“No, I’m not,” Logan said. “And I’m also not the voice of the New England Patriots.”

“I just can’t figure out,” Logan added, “what purpose would posting these type-things … what purpose would they serve? I don’t know.”

The main purpose? Money. This is a type of fraud, experts told The Post. Virtually every fake post includes a link — Roark’s heads to abcnews.besttopixs.com — that includes several ad pop-ups. Every impression on such websites can generate a shred of revenue. Maybe such posts don’t need to hit a million clicks, said Brian Keegan, a professor at CU who researches the dynamics of large-scale online communication. But a thousand clicks on a variety of posts spread across a web of accounts, Keegan said, can make for a profitable operation.

There’s also the potential that such accounts are directly malicious. V.S. Subrahmanian, a professor at Northwestern and an international expert on AI’s intersection with security issues, noted that visiting such links could automatically download cookies that can access one’s banking or personal information.

“It’s kind of a bridge toward being vulnerable in more important spaces,” said University of Denver professor Peter Organisciak, who researches AI applications to large text analysis. “So, if I can be tricked in Nuggets content — then, not having the savvy to identify that I’m being tricked could make me more vulnerable for things like financial crimes.”

Of course, fake Nuggets content exists, too. One account titled “Denver Nuggets True Fans” posted clearly fake images of the notoriously private Nikola Jokic holding a child in an elf onesie at Christmas. It has over 4,400 reactions.

The actual person or people behind such accounts: unknown. Many have linked phone numbers that, when rang, automatically play a message that the call can’t be completed. According to Facebook’s page transparency settings, the manager of the “Wild Horse Warriors” account that posted Roark’s supposed death was located in Vietnam. Several other similar accounts also have managers located in Vietnam.

“You’ve got all these accounts that a lay-user might assume are independent accounts, but are really all controlled by the same click-farm,” Keegan said. “And so they’re all boosting and amplifying each other’s content. And so, the algorithms on Facebook tend to reward or — accelerate this kind of amplification.”

There are various ways AI is likely involved here. As experts said, users controlling such accounts may be writing pieces of code to generate stories around Broncos topics through large-language models like ChatGPT. That, then, could be fed into a separate piece of code that tells an account when to post content, Subrahmanian said.

The expansion and general normalcy of deepfake technology have “enormous” implications, Subrahmanian said. Genuine national security concerns, for one.

Those implications start here, with faceless accounts claiming the erosion of Logan’s vocal cords.

“I think part of the takeaway is like — ‘Hey, you’re not safe from this, even when you’re just reading about football,’” said Casey Fiesler, a professor at CU Boulder who researches technology ethics.

“‘Misinformation, and just general AI slop, is everywhere.”

The effect of trickery

Joe Carol’s freshman year at Grand Junction High was rough. Many freshman years were. A student committed suicide in the school parking lot in the winter of 2016, and many of Carol’s friends transferred out the following year. He was struggling. So Roark, a football coach there, pulled Carol aside.

“He said, ‘Look, I understand, sometimes life can move really fast, and you can get caught up with what’s going on,’” Carol recalled. “‘But just take a second, and listen to the wind blow, and hear the birds chirp. And just remember when life gets moving fast, to just try and slow yourself down.’

“It’s always stuck with me.”

Years later, Carol was sitting in his kitchen in Colorado when he came across an Instagram story that reported his old coach was dead. Carol paused. Considered.

It got him, at first.

“I was actually really sad,” Carol said of his initial reaction. “Like, sadder than I would’ve thought I’d have been, honestly. And just — how awful that is.”