Sports Illustrated writer Drew Ortiz (shown above) doesn’t exist. An investigation showed that he had no social media presence and no publishing history. His profile photo published in the magazine is for sale on a website that sells A.I.-generated headshots; he is described as a “neutral white young-adult male with short brown hair and blue eyes.”
A whistleblower involved with the S.I. scam told the website Futurism that the magazine’s content is now riddled with fake authors. “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,” the anonymous source told the tech website. Another source involved in the Sports Illustrated content creation revealed that least some of the articles were written by bots as well. “The content is absolutely AI-generated,” he or she said, “no matter how much they say that it’s not.”
When Futurist asked Sports Illustrated’s publisher, The Arena Group, about the allegations, the magazine’s management denied them—and then all the AI-generated authors suddenly disappeared from Sports Illustrated’s site. Now the publisher’s explanation is that AdVon Commerce, the company that supplied the posts in question, has been jettisoned as a content provider by the magazine. AdVon, the statement explained, often “had its writers use a pen or pseudo name 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.” The statement also said that “AdVon has assured us that all of the articles in question were written and edited by humans.”
Oh! Well, as long as the company that fronted its articles with undisclosed A.I -generated photos and fake bios assured The Arena Group that its Sports Illustrated articles weren’t similarly faked, that settles it…or as Frank Drebbin would say,
Comments Futurism: “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.”
So do I.
Ethics Alarms 
Pretty much the future of publishing right there. I guess the now unemployed writers could learn to code, or mine coal.
A history lesson from a mostly-retired journalist. Sports Illustrated is a shell of what it once was journalistically. While it was begun in the 1950s as a sports news equivalent to its parent publication Time magazine with the photography component of Life, it hasn’t been owned by a company with a journalism background since 2019. A succession of financial industry owners mined the title for value then passed the remains along to new management. Now, as just one in a roster of “lifestyle publications” put out by the current ownership the full time staff have been replaced by editors who oversee multiple publications on multiple topics and, as noted, run editorial content from poorly paid freelancers and corporate “content providers” that is of questionable provenance. There is an online publication named The Athletic which is today’s best analogy for what SI once provided: solid news coverage of a wide range of mainstream and niche sports, including investigative pieces, and entertaining columnists. It was not nearly profitable and I did not expect it to survive but a purchase earlier this year by The New York Times who replaced their own sports desk editors and reporters with coverage from The Athletic (which caused heartburn in ‘the Gray Lady’s’ newsroom because Athletic writers aren’t members of the News Guild union) has given the publication a dose of financial security.
Yikes! My life has become like a character from “Three Days of the Condor”. It’s becoming harder and harder to believe or trust anyone.
Now I wonder how many of those swimsuit models actually exist.
I’ve met SI swimsuit cover model Kate Upton, at a fundraiser for the animal shelter her parents run in the Florida town where I live now. She was wearing a t-shirt and jeans, not a bikini, and holding a puppy; both were cute, but it was clear that Ms. Upton’s photos involved a lot of “work” by makeup artists, hair stylists and quite likely some manipulation of the digital images.
I met Kim Alexis in 1985 in Acapulco and am looking at a picture (orchestrated by yours truly…) of us as I type.
Natural beauty; I wouldn’t have changed a thing!
PWS
PS What the hell is going on with wordpress commenting?
Well, among other things, WP won’t let me comment on my own posts without logging in, which I refuse to do. I can reply to a comment without any problem though.<sigh>. I guess I'll have to have another chat with a "happiness engineer."
I’m receiving emails from WordPress nearly everyday that are Black Friday sales pitches for WordPress. I haven’t looked to see what it is that they want me to buy, but these sales pitches are either brand new or were previously captured by my SPAM folder.
If I get sufficiently annoyed, I’ll send them an email about the poor quality of the free version; I won’t reward them.
I get no emails from WP at all.
To be fair, I kind of appreciate the new commenting interface, if you highlight the text and click the bold/italic/
whateverbutton in the header, you get to do formatting without code and you see that it’s working in real time.It took me a minute to figure out the text-link creator. That’s a useful time & effort saver.
Hmm, is that something you get if you log in to WordPress? I don’t see a header line.
<i>”Now I wonder how many of those swimsuit models actually exist.”</i>
Dylan Mulvaney, et al, in the <b><i>On Deck Circle</i></b>…?
PWS
The real question is, “Were the AI stories better or worse than stories from actual sports writers”?