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Sports Illustrated Published Articles by Fake, AI-Generated Writers (futurism.com) 45

Futurism has accused Sports Illustrated of publishing AI-generated articles under fake author biographies. The magazine has since removed the articles in question and released a statement blaming the issue on a contractor. From the report: There was nothing in Drew Ortiz's author biography at Sports Illustrated to suggest that he was anything other than human. "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." The only problem? 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."

Ortiz isn't the only AI-generated author published by Sports Illustrated, according to a person involved with the creation of the content who asked to be kept anonymous to protect them from professional repercussions. "There's a lot," they told us of the fake authors. "I was like, what are they? This is ridiculous. This person does not exist." "At the bottom [of the page] there would be a photo of a person and some fake description of them like, 'oh, John lives in Houston, Texas. He loves yard games and hanging out with his dog, Sam.' Stuff like that," they continued. "It's just crazy."

According to a second person involved in the creation of the Sports Illustrated content who also asked to be kept anonymous, that's because it's not just the authors' headshots that are AI-generated. At least some of the articles themselves, they said, were churned out using AI as well. "The content is absolutely AI-generated," the second source said, "no matter how much they say that it's not." 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. [...] 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.
An Arena Group spokesperson issued the following statement blaming 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."
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Sports Illustrated Published Articles by Fake, AI-Generated Writers

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    All so spontaneous and personal.
    But we're all craving for this kind of 'information'.

  • If the articles are informative, well-written, and enjoyable to read, what does it matter if they were written by a human, a computer, or a cat?
    • Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Informative)

      by GrumpySteen ( 1250194 ) on Tuesday November 28, 2023 @06:56PM (#64039679)

      From TFA

      one Ortiz article, for instance, warns that volleyball "can be a little tricky to get into, especially without an actual ball to practice with."

      What was that you were saying about the articles being "informative, well-written, and enjoyable to read"?

      • You try getting into volleyball without a ball. Why when I was a kid we were so poor we played volleyball for 10 years without a ball and we liked it!
        • by Briareos ( 21163 )

          You think you had it bad? We didn't even have a home - we lived in a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us...

      • Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Informative)

        by Brain-Fu ( 1274756 ) on Tuesday November 28, 2023 @08:46PM (#64039837) Homepage Journal

        If I am paying for content, I want to know whether it was written by a human, or an AI.

        That's all. It's ok with me to use AI to generate content so long as it is disclosed. It should be my choice whether to patronize this or not, on a case-by-case basis. Lying to me by presenting this as human-authored when it is not, THAT is not ok.

        Just as we have laws regulating honesty in advertising, and in food ingredient disclosure, we need laws regulating the sale of AI-generated content. And mandatory disclosure is a must-have.

        • by Anonymous Coward
          why? I don't give a shit whether it is written by a person or computer or 3 eyed martian, a disabled monkey etc. the Author has no bearing on my entertainment factor, in fact I could not even tell you the name of a single author of entertainment content I have read in the past 6 months, it is a meaningless item.
          • Sounds like a difference of values. Unlike you, I DO care where my content comes from. It's as simple as that.

            Other people care too, which is why we need laws to ensure that those who care, know. Those like you, who do not care, are free to ignore the information.

  • If you have pay for ChatGPT, use GPT4 with this prompt:

    Using the internet, writing in an old school western fashion, as a fan of the Chiefs, write an article about the Nov 26, 2023 game between the KC Chiefs and the Raiders.

    It searched 3-4 websites before returning the article below. And the persona is interesting (and could be much deeper in context, this is about the simplest example for the flair).

    This probably breaks NFL copyright about the descriptions and such (thoughts anyone?). Better than decent

  • I knew there was no way Frank Deford and Karl Taro Greenfeld were real people!

  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Tuesday November 28, 2023 @07:26PM (#64039757)
    The right sports stories since the 90s. It's a little funny that rather than using the existing computer programs that they've had kicking around for ages they used in llm and got these somewhat silly results.

    A huge part of the reason people gave up on journalism and newspapers is because they stopped giving us useful information when they all got bought out by a handful of billionaires looking to maximize shareholder value and occasionally throw out a little pro billionaire propaganda.
    • Thats a good point. In the local paper of a medium sized town there used to be a whole section ( 5- 7 pages) of hyper local news written by someone living in the area. Sure some of it was corny at times as they'd run out of content to talk about. But it was pretty cool to have local commentators talk about things like the state of the roads and upcoming funding initiatives to pay for repairs, things going on at the neighborhood library, etc. It was nice. Thats all gone now. Maybe some of the stories on the
  • I don't bother to read the articles.

    • by Opyros ( 1153335 )
      So what will you do when they start using generative AI instead of models?
      • by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Tuesday November 28, 2023 @10:48PM (#64040023)

        So what will you do when they start using generative AI instead of models?

        That's hilarious, considering what the average model actually looks like without makeup and Photoshop.

        You act as if reality has been the cornerstone of that industry.

      • why would you care, no body looks at them for their minds. whether it is from the imagination of a computer or the digitally enhanced photoshopped pictures from a camera what difference does that make to your enjoyment of the picture?
      • by Anonymous Coward
        what you see at the moment is no better than a computer generated image. In fact most of the image is computer smoothed, enhanced and altered to the extent you would not recognize most of those models if you bumped into them on the street.
  • Sports Illustrated? Did they detect the AI because it could hallucinate news better than people? I don't recall SI being very accurate.
  • by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Tuesday November 28, 2023 @10:27PM (#64039985)

    About human-written ads masquerading as articles. Why would they care about AI-written ads?

    • Exactly. "The articles in question were product reviews and were licensed content from an external, third-party company" You found out that your magazine was substituting "product reviews" with ads they hadn't even bothered to read, and your only complaint is that the ads were AI generated?
  • Aren't some columns, articles (and even books) given bylines of a fictional persona, when the reality is that a stable of staff or contract ghostwriters actually write the material? I don't mean a nome de plume that's hiding a real person. I mean they make up a person. Hasn't this sort of thing been done for a couple centuries?

    And now that we can eliminate the un-credited human writers and have an AI do the same thing...

    P.S.
    One example is "Abigail Van Buren", who writes the Dear Abby advice column. That sta

  • Perhaps one of the reasons that people are upset is that the article is intended to personally relate to the reader. It's a story about an aspect of life, from one appreciative human to another. When the truth is that it is an un-thinking not-alive machine being presented as a real person. It is a deception, and can feel manipulative.

    A related factor is, "Hey, I paid to read a human-written article! You gave me a crap computer article! I want the real thing!"

    Would people read Sports Illustrated if they knew

  • As a former subscriber to the print magazine, I thought the writing was just superb. An article about the (now deceased) owner of the Oakland Raiders football team had a quote that still makes me laugh many years later. It went something like this: "Al Davis was a prickly SOB, and you can shorten that to just plain prick if you want."

    I let my subscription lapse after the annual swimsuit issue one year had plus size models, and the year after that featured models that were amputees or other had disfigurin

  • If I recall a user on the subreddit for World of Warcraft recognised that sites using LLM generated articles were clearly using their posts for input to write about WoW, so a nonsensical character called "Glorbo" who in replies was hyped as a real forthcoming feature by the derivative sites.

    So, with sports fans having rival teams, it's only a matter of time before the same tactic can be used. QUARTERBACK hospitalised after violent altercation with Sonic The Hedgehog speedrunner.

    Or ex-subscribers who're unha

  • by Rotting ( 7243 )

    I think AI was used to write the article that accused SI of using AI to write articles. Now what do we do?

  • that they have a contractor that is supposed to be producing articles that are actually marketing (without being labeled as such) ... but not OK that these marketicles are AI produced? I think there is a bigger issue here.

    I have to wonder if the deny, deny, deflect, nothing-to-see here response has been sitting around for months ready to be deployed when this all got detected. You know there are executives and boardroom types pushing for using AI to make money at a company like this. I find it hard to
  • The reassigning of authors is a clear indication that the original work could not have had its rights assigned under contract. So the entire work-for-hire agreement falls apart between Sports Illustrated's owner The Arena Group and AdVon Commerce. According to ChatGPT :) "knowingly claiming copyright over content that you do not own can be considered fraudulent under U.S. federal law".
  • Click on that link for the headshot and note the teeth on that image... really really bad baby teeth. Creepy AF.
  • that anybody bought it for the articles.
  • Wait until we find out that the entire swimsuit edition was created by Dall-E.
  • I don't see the problem. Readers were perfectly happy with it.

  • We need an AI generated review of the article. Go full circle.

    Eventually, we'll get garbage in, and garbage out.

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