Sports Illustrated Published Articles by Fake, AI-Generated Writers

After we reached out with questions to the magazine's publisher, The Arena Group, all the AI-generated authors disappeared from Sports Illustrated's site without explanation.

Initially, our questions received no response. But after we published this story, an Arena Group spokesperson provided the following statement that blamed a contractor for the content:
 

Today, an article was published alleging that Sports Illustrated published AI-generated articles. According to our initial investigation, this is not accurate. The articles in question were product reviews and were licensed content from an external, third-party company, AdVon Commerce. A number of AdVon's e-commerce articles ran on certain Arena websites. We continually monitor our partners and were in the midst of a review when these allegations were raised. AdVon has assured us that all of the articles in question were written and edited by humans. According to AdVon, their writers, editors, and researchers create and curate content and follow a policy that involves using both counter-plagiarism and counter-AI software on all content. However, we have learned that AdVon had writers use a pen or pseudo name in certain articles to protect author privacy — actions we don't condone — and we are removing the content while our internal investigation continues and have since ended the partnership.

It sounds like The Arena Group's investigation pretty much just involved asking AdVon whether the content was AI-generated, and taking them at their word when they said it wasn't. Our sources familiar with the creation of the content disagree.

The statement also never addresses the core allegation of our story: that Sports Illustrated published content from nonexistent writers with AI-generated headshots. The implication seems to be that AdVon invented fake writers, assigned them fake biographies and AI-generated headshots, and then stopped right there, only publishing content written by old-fashioned humans. Maybe that's true, but we doubt it.

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.

Do you know anything about The Arena Group's use of AI-generated content? Shoot us an email at tips@futurism.com. We can keep you anonymous.

Making the whole thing even more dubious, these AI-generated personas are periodically scrubbed from existence in favor of new ones.

Sometime this summer, for example, Ortiz disappeared from Sports Illustrated's site entirely, his profile page instead redirecting to that of a "Sora Tanaka." Again, there's no online record of a writer by that name — but Tanaka's profile picture is for sale on the same AI headshot marketplace as Ortiz, where she's listed as "joyful asian young-adult female with long brown hair and brown eyes."

"Sora has always been a fitness guru, and loves to try different foods and drinks," read Tanaka's bio. "Ms. Tanaka is thrilled to bring her fitness and nutritional expertise to the Product Reviews Team, and promises to bring you nothing but the best of the best."
 

But Tanaka didn't last, either. Eventually she also disappeared, replaced by yet another profile that carried no headshot at all, which Sports Illustrated deleted along with the other AI-generated content after we reached out.

It wasn't just author profiles that the magazine repeatedly replaced. Each time an author was switched out, the posts they supposedly penned would be reattributed to the new persona, with no editor's note explaining the change in byline.

None of the articles credited to Ortiz or the other names contained any disclosure about the use of AI or that the writer wasn't real, though they did eventually gain a disclaimer explaining that the content was "created by a 3rd party," and that the "Sports Illustrated editorial staff are not involved in the creation of this content."

Do you know anything about that "3rd party," or how the content was created? Email us at tips@futurism.com. We can keep you anonymous.

Though Sports Illustrated's AI-generated authors and their articles disappeared after we asked about them, similar operations appear to be alive and well elsewhere in The Arena Group's portfolio.

Take TheStreet, a financial publication cofounded by Jim Cramer in 1996 that The Arena Group bought for $16.5 million in 2019. Like at Sports Illustrated, we found authors at TheStreet with highly specific biographies detailing seemingly flesh-and-blood humans with specific areas of expertise — but with profile photos traceable to that same AI face website. And like at Sports Illustrated, these fake writers are periodically wiped from existence and their articles reattributed to new names, with no disclosure about the use of AI.

Sometimes TheStreet's efforts to remove the fake writers can be sloppy. On its review section's title page, for instance, the site still proudly flaunts the expertise of AI-generated contributors who have since been deleted, linking to writer profiles it describes as ranging "from stay-at-home dads to computer and information analysts." This team, the site continues, "is comprised of a well-rounded group of people who bring varying backgrounds and experiences to the table."

People? We're not so sure.