A new type of “journalism” is taking hold online. Digital marketers, posing as journalists, have found a new formula to drive traffic. It’s a mix of using AI tools to watch websites for changes, generate text, and scrape pictures to create posts for websites like http://www.bigbendtimes.com and http://www.texpreporter.com. This allows these site to post a lot of content. Then the so called journalist can add in their own stories as well and it can seem to most people that they are looking at a legitimate news site with real journalism and not an SEO adtech website designed to drive clicks and make money.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and what it means is making changes to websites so they appear higher up in the searches on google, duckduckgo, and other search engines. Adtech refers to technology that is used online to make people do things like buy products or vote for a candidate or believe things that aren’t necessarily true. There can be a lot of money to be made if someone understands adtech and SEO. But the motivations of the people in this space are usually not great. This search will give someone an idea of what lengths adtech people will go to to make a buck. So when this reporter first came upon The Big Bend’s own SEO clickbait site bigbendtimes.com, they were not surprised. It seems obvious to this reported that David Flash has realized he can generate fake controversy in our West Texas community and it will drive traffic to his sites, his social media accounts, and his gofundme. Flash makes a little money, and the community suffers.
It appears that bigbendtimes.com started as a genuine website for David Flash to post articles about the region. It started in 2020 with an article in July, then another in November. Then in 2021 an article in January followed by 5 posts of pictures in June. 2022 was a big year that jumped up to maybe 19 posts. A bunch of photos and a few articles with text. Then in March of 2023 something happened.
In early March of 2023 Big Bend Times began posting a lot more content. Four posts March 4th, three on the 6th, and more. Then on March 13 six articles posted in one day. Eight on the 25th. It appears that during March of 2023, David Flash figured out how to generate stories with AI. We don’t know this for sure, perhaps he took an extended vacation from his job as a steam cleaning salesman to write a large number of stories. It just seems weird the way most of the stories match a pattern. Now… some of the stories David Flash posts are clearly written by David himself. The stories David likely writes himself are what Big Bend Times Dot Org are calling his Grudge Stories. Those stories will be discussed more below and in other articles. Let’s stick with the posts that are almost certainly generated with AI.
There are dozens or more AI tools available that can perform many different tasks for people who want to drive traffic to a website like bigbendtimes.com. There are tools that will monitor websites for changes and alert someone when those changes happen, like VisualPing. Someone could monitor all of the realtors’ websites in the Big Bend Region and be alerted when new listings appear, or get an alert anytime a new business posts something to Big Bend Chat on FB. Then someone could take the alerts from there and use a tool like Quilbot to write content that can then be posted to a website. There is likely a tool out there that will automatically search the web or FB for a picture related to the generated content to post with the story, as one can see on bigbendtimes.com. The posts that are likely generated with AI all have a picture, usually scraped from facebook, that is posted with a credit link pointing to where it was scraped. It’s great that David Flash at least gives most people credit when scraping their images, but this reporter has talked to a number of people who have confirmed that he posts their images to his own website without permission.
When one looks at the bigbendtimes.com website on April 17th, 2025, they will see two stories near the top of the page. First we see this: https://bigbendtimes.com/2025/04/17/alpine-isd-second-graders-take-math-outside-with-playground-measurement-activity/ This is an article with 3 paragraphs and one picture scraped from the Alpine ISB FB account. Next we see this: https://bigbendtimes.com/2025/04/17/fort-davis-isd-names-ralph-traynham-interim-superintendent/ This is an article with 3 paragraphs and a picture with no credit, perhaps taken by David Flash. If one clicks through on most of the articles they all follow this same format, some with a varying number of paragraphs but most with exactly 3 and a pic scraped from FB. It’s this reporter’s opinion that the vast majority of posts like these at bigbendtimes.com are generated by AI. The entire process could be automated. Or David could do a small amount of work to generate each post. This gives people the idea that bigbendtimes.com is more than just a guy in Austin generating SEO adtech crap. David Flash often writes about his ‘editorial team,’ our editorial team (Full Disclosure: it’s just me on the team) thinks David Flash doesn’t have a team, it’s just him and some AI tools.
The US Copyright Office recently said that AI generated outputs can’t be copyrighted. “…a work of art needs “some degree of originality” and “human authorship,” in order for it to be eligible for copyright in the United States. Crucially, simply plugging prompts into an AI image generator or text generator does NOT meet this burden.” This means that if David Flash has fully automated the task of generating posts, they likely cannot be copyrighted. If someone wanted to use his posts as content for themselves, they could create a website that reposts all of David’s AI generated articles and it would be interesting to see if he would have any recourse. If the text can’t be copyrighted, it could theoretically be copied verbatim. Or someone could use AI to change the article just enough to avoid copyright issues. If this reporter finds a site doing this, our editorial team will report back here.
Now we can examine one of David Flash’s Grudge Articles. There are a few ways to identify the Grudge Articles at bigbendtimes.com. First, they are longer posts with many paragraphs. Next, they always, and I mean always, talk about David Flash in the 3rd person, even though David is the one writing:
“A voicemail left by Big Bend Times publisher David Flash to the County Attorney’s Office…” He added: “Flash, who has extensively documented the conduct…” David Flash consistently quotes himself in his posts and the reader must be paying attention to notice that David is actually writing about himself. This grudge article concludes with this “Flash also emphasized that his intention was not to provoke but to encourage lawful behavior and transparency. “This is not personal,” he said. “I take no pleasure in reporting negatively on the place I once called home. But when public officials behave unlawfully or unprofessionally, and refuse to engage in basic accountability, they undermine trust in local government and damage the integrity of the community as a whole.”
This reporter hopes that anyone who has donated to Flash’s GoFundMe will consider requesting a refund. It doesn’t seem like David is really trying to fight corruption but that he is manufacturing controversy to drive traffic to his clickbait websites.
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