Sports Illustrated Caught Using AI

I haven't subscribed to Sports Illustrated since the 1990s. By then, the poetry had gone out of the games, and writers who could tell stories were left talking about contracts, scandals, and the corporatism that dominated the games. The ravenous maw of sports media chewed up the interesting personalities and spit them out, leaving a soulless shadow behind.

But in its heyday, SI was home to some of the best English language writers who used the short form of magazine writing to create achingly beautiful masterpieces. 

There were Frank Deford, Rick Telander, Jim Murray, and Rick Reilly's "Backpage" column that I always read first, as well as a host of others who made sports into literature — great epic poems that moved the reader to tears, to anger, to laughter.

So it was with a mixture of sadness and anger that I read about SI's betrayal of those writers. According to the site Futurism, SI used artificial intelligence-generated copy and AI-generated writer profiles and passed them off as real people.

One such fabricated author, Drew Ortiz, had a biography that didn't suggest he was anything but a normal human. "Product reviewer for all things Outdoors, Camping, Backyard Games, Hunting, and Fishing," his bio said.

 "Drew has spent much of his life outdoors, and is excited to guide you through his never-ending list of the best products to keep you from falling to the perils of nature," it read. "Nowadays, there is rarely a weekend that goes by where Drew isn't out camping, hiking, or just back on his parents' farm."

There was only one problem: no trace of Drew could be found in the real world.

Outside of Sports Illustrated, Drew Ortiz doesn't seem to exist. He has no social media presence and no publishing history. And even more strangely, his profile photo on Sports Illustrated is for sale on a website that sells AI-generated headshots, where he's described as "neutral white young-adult male with short brown hair and blue eyes."

"The content is absolutely AI-generated," the second source said, "no matter how much they say that it's not."

Indeed, when confronted by Futurism about fake content and fake authors, the magazine's publisher, The Arena Group, deleted all the AI-generated bios and articles.  

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The Arena Group claims that the fake content was "product reviews" and besides, they were "licensed content from an external, third-party company, AdVon Commerce."

Advon created the "product reviews" apparently for a fee from the company selling a product. We used to call this sort of thing "reader ads." They were "news stories" written in the form of newspaper copy disguising the ads.

Regardless, the AI content marks a staggering fall from grace for Sports Illustrated, which in past decades won numerous National Magazine Awards for its sports journalism and published work by literary giants ranging from William Faulkner to John Updike.

But now that it's under the management of The Arena Group, parts of the magazine seem to have devolved into a Potemkin Village in which phony writers are cooked up out of thin air, outfitted with equally bogus biographies and expertise to win readers' trust, and used to pump out AI-generated buying guides that are monetized by affiliate links to products that provide a financial kickback when readers click them.

Advon played an insidious game with readers. They would frequently change out AI-generated writers for another and then simply switch author credit from the old author to the new one without making any mention of the change. 

Readers were not only kept in the dark about the change in credit for articles, they were never told what content was generated by AI.

Is this the future? So long as it's more profitable to fake stories rather than have someone actually create them, AI-generated writing will be part of the writing landscape. Soon, AI is expected to be able to generate writing as well as many authors. Welcome to the Brave New World.

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