This article was written by a real person. Usually we wouldn’t feel obliged to specify this, but it seems that it has become impossible to take for granted. In fact, even the American magazine Sports Illustrated appears to have published some articles written by generative AI, with some news attributed to authors who, in reality, are the result of artificial intelligence.
Sports Illustrated would publish articles written by the AI
According to what Futurism reports, Sports Illustrated would have published articles by non-existent journalists. Specifically, “Drew Ortiz,” described as an individual who has spent much of his life outdoors, and “Sora Tanaka,” a fitness and food enthusiast. According to what real journalists report Futurismthe portraits of these authors were in reality generated images from a website specializing in artificial intelligence.
Journalists (created by AI) disappeared
After that Futurism has contacted The Arena Grouppublisher of Sports Illustrated, the alleged artificial perpetrators suddenly disappeared. In the articles written by these authors generated byartificial intelligencethe publisher added a disclaimer stating that “This content is created by a third party”, disassociating the editorial team of Sports Illustrated from the creation of such content.
As The Verge reports, this episode is not isolated. In October, a similar disclaimer appeared on Reviewa review site owned by Gannett. In that case, the site’s staff had accused the publisher of publishing content clearly generated by theartificial intelligence. But the company had said that it had used contributions from another company, which allegedly ensured that it had not used generative AI.
The company suspected of creating the articles written by the AI
It seems that a company called is behind the articles of both companies AdVon Commercewhich would generate the two authors’ articles on Sports Illustrated than on other sites, as reported by the disclaimers present in the same stories.
On LinkedIn, AdVon says “provide AI and ML solutions [Machine Learning] for e-Commerce“. This suggests that the company also uses generative AI in the production of other content – perhaps online newspaper articles?
Pseudonyms of real people or AI?
Spokespeople for The Arena Group reported to the American press that they had indeed collaborated with AdVon Commerce to generate content. And they state: “we learned that AdVon asked the authors to use a pen name or pseudonym in some articles to protect the privacy of the author – actions we do not condone – and are removing the content while our internal investigation continues and have since ended the partnership.”
The email addresses and contact information associated with the authors of the articles link to several authors of other articles, some of them complete LinkedIn profiles. Why create these pseudonyms, to protect the reporters’ names? Wouldn’t it have been enough to create a fictitious name, without creating a fake online identity?
Sports Illustrated makes sure to star carrying out an assessment of content to ensure that it is not generated by AI. But the point is: why turn to a company that creates AI content for e-commerce to write newspaper articles? At the moment, neither Futurism’s accusations nor the publishers’ and companies’ justifications can be denied. But there seems to be a strong problem of transparency, which certainly won’t make the publisher look good.