Canada’s largest airport is warning passengers to be careful about what they click on. Officials at Toronto Pearson Airport say artificial-intelligence (AI) 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 AI,” 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 them.“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.”CityNews reached out to the websites for comment, but did not immediately receive a response.Experts say online users need to be more vigilant in the age of AI 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. Toronto Pearson Airport provided CityNews with the following list of sites it says are producing fake, AI-generated content:• TheTraveler.org• Toronto Digest• Travel and Tour World• NomadLawyer• Travel Tourister