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Sports Illustrated Under Fire For Allegedly Creating AI Writers To Write AI Generated Stories Then Deleting The AI Authors To Make New Ones

AI is A complete game changer for a lot of companies. That could be a good thing, but for the most part it doesn’t seem that way.

Sports Illustrated is finding out how bad that can be.

The renowned sports publication has recently come under fire for allegedly, coming up with fake AI generated profiles to put out stories making it seem like they were posted by real people. To make things worse after being caught they deleted all of the post, according to Futurism.

There was nothing in Drew Ortiz’s author biography at Sports Illustrated to suggest that he was anything other than human.

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.”

Not only did they come up with AI generated authors, but in some instances, they came up with AI generated articles. Even more, after a while, they deleted old AI personas so they could create new ones.

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.”

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.”

There are a few things to unpack here. First, coming up with fake articles by fake people hurts the integrity of journalism. There are some things that AI can’t write like certain tones of or story and such. There are just some things that have to be written by a human being.

Second, this just shows how cheap companies become and how they try to save money. If they wanted to have the content out there then they should just hire people to write it. Instead, so they don’t have to pay anyone, they allegedly created people to do so. Just spend the money to hire people or pay the employees you already have to write the content you want.

Sports Illustrated has reportedly not make any comments on the situation.

 

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