Sports Illustrated published articles by fake authors generated by AI
According to the Futurism, Sports Illustrated magazine published articles by fake authors on its website. It was discovered that the authors of the articles, “Drew Ortiz” and “Sora Tanaka,” had photos for sale on an artificially intelligent image site. In addition, the articles themselves, often with clumsy language and strange wording, appeared to be generated by artificial intelligence. This suspicion was confirmed by the publication’s sources involved in the creation of the content.
The Arena Group, the company that publishes Sports Illustrated, denied the allegations that the articles themselves were generated by AI. However, after Futurism’s investigation, the signatures of the fake authors were replaced with a disclaimer stating that the content was created by a third party, not Sports Illustrated.
It appears that the same company, AdVon Commerce, is behind similar content on Sports Illustrated and another site, Reviewed (a Gannett consumer review site). AdVon, which describes itself as a company offering “ML/AI solutions for e-commerce,” appeared to be associated with several authors listed on other websites owned by The Arena Group. However, some of these authors are real people working for AdVon Commerce.
The Arena Group confirmed that their partnership with AdVon was reviewed when allegations of artificial intelligence content creation surfaced. They learned that AdVon was forcing authors to use pseudonyms in some articles, a practice that The Arena Group disapproves of, which led to the removal of the content and the termination of their partnership with AdVon.