Sports Illustrated deletes articles bylined to fake, AI-generated authors

Futurism reported that Sports Illustrated’s website carried product-review articles bylined to authors who did not appear to exist. One, “Drew Ortiz,” had a profile photo Futurism traced to a marketplace selling AI-generated headshots, alongside a biography describing him as an outdoorsy writer; he had no social media presence, no publishing history elsewhere, and no verifiable identity outside the Sports Illustrated site. A person with knowledge of the site’s content operation told Futurism there were “a lot” of such invented bylines, and that articles had at times been reassigned from one fabricated author to another without explanation.

Sports Illustrated’s publisher, the Arena Group, deleted the flagged author profiles after Futurism’s inquiry and said the articles were licensed product reviews supplied by a third-party contractor, AdVon Commerce, which it said had assured the publisher “all of the articles in question were written and edited by humans.” The company acknowledged that AdVon had used pen names “to protect author privacy,” calling that practice one it did not condone, but stopped short of confirming Futurism’s central finding that the content itself was AI-generated — a claim Futurism said its own sources at Arena directly contradicted.

The fallout extended beyond the removed articles. The Arena Group ended its relationship with AdVon and, in a wider round of executive departures the company attributed to operational restructuring, terminated chief executive Ross Levinsohn on 11 December 2023, along with several other senior executives.

The episode became a widely cited early example of the reputational risk facing publishers that used AI-assisted or AI-generated content without disclosure, at a moment when readers and media critics were newly primed to look for exactly this kind of fabrication.