The renowned magazine Sports Illustrated allegedly published articles that were created by artificial intelligence-generated authors posing as humans, Futurism reported Monday.
An author by the name of Drew Ortiz appears to only exist on the author biography page of Sports Illustrated, according to Futurism. Outside the magazine, Ortiz appeared to have no social media presence or publishing history, and his profile picture looked almost identical to a headshot generated by an AI website. (RELATED: ‘Game Of Thrones’ Author, Other Prominent Novelists Sue Over AI Copyright Infringement)
Futurism caught Sports Illustrated publishing AI stories — with fake author profile pages and all. We went to them with it, and they wiped…all of it. https://t.co/bjPvqWeOBI pic.twitter.com/dh100fxUOJ
— foster kamer. (@weareyourfek) November 27, 2023
Oritz’s headshot appears to have been taken from Generated Photos, a website that sells AI-generated pictures, Futurism reported. The description for the profile appears to have been listed under “neutral white young-adult male with short brown hair and blue eyes.”
Two anonymous sources involved in Sports Illustrated content spoke to Futurism and said the content and the author looked AI-generated.
“There’s a lot,” one source told Futurism of the magazine’s use of AI-generated authors. “The content is absolutely AI-generated,” another source told the outlet. Sports Illustrated has yet to leave Futurism a comment.
Futurism also caught further suspicious incidents of this alleged practice by Sports Illustrated. One incident involved an author called Sora Tanaka, whose lookalike profile was found under the same website selling AI-generated headshots, according to Futurism.
Tanaka appears to have replaced Oritz, whose profile seems to have been scrubbed from the Sports Illustrated website, according to Futurism. The outlet also found other news sites appearing to do the same, creating temporary AI authors and erasing them after a few weeks or months.
Sports Illustrated and other outlets used AI-tools back in February 2023 to generate articles and pitch journalists topics to investigate, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Other major platforms like Google have tested out AI-written news articles as well, The New York Times reported back in July. But the AI article generation was never intended to replace human journalists, the company emphasized.
“Quite simply, these tools are not intended to, and cannot, replace the essential role journalists have in reporting, creating and fact-checking their articles,” Jenn Crider, a Google spokesperson, told the Times.