‘Sports Illustrated’ Says the Articles Published on Its Website Under Fake Names With Generated Headshots Were Actually Written by Humans ⇥ defector.com

Maggie Harrison, Futurism:

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.”

After we reached out with questions to the magazine’s publisher, The Arena Group, all the AI-generated authors disappeared from Sports Illustrated’s site without explanation.

As Harrison notes, articles from people with fake names and headshots also appeared on another Arena Group site, the Street, which offers financial and investing advice. One of those authors, according to Harrison, is “Nicole Merrifield”. Harrison pointed to one article with personal finance tips; within that article are links to lists of recommended books about personal finance and investing — these picks are again credited to Merrifield.

David Roth, Defector:

The assurance from Sports Illustrated’s brass that what Futurism flagged as AI-generated content was in fact the product of 100 percent all-natural free-range human spammers is not only not reassuring, but just a restatement of the wild insult and threat running through all of this. It doesn’t matter if they are lying, or selling, or in earnest. They are in the business of selling noise, and they are selling a lot of it. What sounds like a metaphor — the wailing and yammering and relentless showboating salesmanship of the rich making every other sound indistinct or inaudible — is in point of fact just a description.

We are going to see a lot more of this.

So many of the sites with names you recognize have spent the past couple of decades juicing their search rankings and ad revenue by publishing as much stuff as possible, regardless of its quality. Remember when every news story was split across two or more pages, or was inexplicably delivered in the form of a slideshow?¹ The success of sites like the Huffington Post and Business Insider proved how much value there was in simply retyping and summarizing someone else’s news story, with only a cursory source link. Then structured lists became popular because the format broke long articles into sections with keyword-dense titles. The success of the Wirecutter encouraged more opportunities for affiliate linking across the web through product recommendations.

None of this made the web better for people. This formula of insubstantial content already reeks of something generated by a system rather than written by people, and that was true before any of it was machine-produced.