From fictional biographies to AI-generated profile pictures, Futurism has been investigating AdVon Commerce, the company behind the Sports Illustrated fake writer scandal from last year — and its reach appears to stretch further than many could have predicted.
“What we found should alarm anyone who cares about a trustworthy and ethical media industry,” reports Futurism. “It’s a practice that blurs the line between journalism and advertising to the breaking point, makes the web worse for everybody, and renders basic questions like ‘is this writer a real person?’ fuzzier and fuzzier.”
Was psyched to go see the Pacers tonight. I think Halliburton, Turner and Siakam can be a legit Big 3. Was not expecting a #blazers win. Especially without Ant and Sharpe. Great game! #trailblazers#ripcity#pdx#nba
@mrcompletely@caravan yes yes yes. Same. I am older than you. I remember the '83 copy of #SI#sportsillustrated with Dr. J on the cover and title "The Sixers are Going for 70" - it changed my life. I had that cover on my wall. I was a Warriors fan all those years they were terrible, but obviously the #NBA through 80s, through 90s, was always amazing. Hell, I moved to Miami 2000-2005 for Shaq and DWade. The NBA has always been #1 for me.
Sports Illustrated has apparently been publishing AI-generated articles by “authors” who don’t exist beyond their AI-generated photos. This is a much bigger problem than most people realize, and the implications are quite dire — consider, for example, that the same thing is happening in medical and scientific journals (it is). #AI#disinformation#media#socialmedia
Arena Group continues to drive Sports Illustrated into the ground
>> "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. Our questions received no response.
On that CNET thing in the last boost, my first thought was "this is gonna make search even more useless" and… yeeeep "They are clearly optimized to take advantage of Google’s search algorithms, and to end up at the top of peoples’ results pages"
Update on that @futurism#SportsIllustrated#AI story: SI denies, claiming it was outsourced to AdVon who "has assured us that all of the articles in question were written and edited by humans." but uh, I dunno, guess someone should let AdVon, the definitely human copy writing company know their LinkedIn has been vandalized to say they're an AI company hiring programmers https://twitter.com/SInow/status/1729275460922622374