Sports Illustrated AI Authors

What They Said

Arena Group, the publicly traded media company that licensed Sports Illustrated from Authentic Brands Group, spent 2023 telling investors it was reinventing the magazine business through AI-assisted content. CEO Ross Levinsohn pitched analysts on a model where AI would help SI publish more content, more cheaply, across more verticals — product reviews, buying guides, evergreen explainers — than a traditional newsroom could sustain.

The public-facing pitch was that AI would augment human editors. Reviewers like “Drew Ortiz” had bios on the SI website with friendly headshots, hobbies, and writing histories. The articles read like the workmanlike product-review copy that has financed digital publishing for a decade.

What Actually Happened

In November 2023, Futurism’s Maggie Harrison Dupré published an investigation that ended Arena Group’s stewardship of Sports Illustrated. Drew Ortiz did not exist. His headshot was for sale on an AI-generated portrait site. Other “authors” listed on SI.com had the same provenance. A source inside the company told Futurism the articles were AI-generated and that the bylines were invented to give them human cover.

When Futurism asked for comment, the fake author profiles were pulled from the site within hours. Arena Group blamed an outside contractor, AdVon Commerce, and said it had terminated the relationship. The damage was already done. The Sports Illustrated Union issued a statement of “horror.” The SI editor-in-chief said staff had been unaware. Authentic Brands Group, the IP owner, made clear that publishing fake authors under the SI masthead was not what it had licensed.

In January 2024, Arena Group missed a $3.75M quarterly payment to Authentic Brands. The license was revoked. By May 2024, Authentic Brands had moved Sports Illustrated to a new operator, Minute Media. Arena Group’s stock, which had traded above $20 in 2021, fell below $1. The company laid off most of the SI staff and continued shrinking through 2024.

A 70-year-old American media brand changed hands because a publisher published fake people writing about toys and footballs.

The Root Cause

The CEO’s commercial pitch outran the editorial controls. Arena Group had told the market it would use AI to widen margins on content. Operationally, that pressure pushed cost and oversight off the org chart and onto a third-party content vendor. Once the work was outsourced, no one inside the building was accountable for whether the bylines were real. The fiction was load-bearing for the business model.

The deeper failure was a misread of what the SI license was actually worth. The brand’s value was not its URL. It was 70 years of credibility built by named journalists. Once the masthead was caught laundering AI copy, the license collateral evaporated faster than the licensee could replace it.

The Pattern to Watch For

When AI content production gets outsourced to a vendor whose incentives are volume and margin, the reputational risk lives with you and the legal risk lives with you, but the controls live with them. That asymmetry is the failure pattern. Any time someone proposes scaling content through a vendor pipeline, the question to ask first is which named human inside your company is accountable for the byline on every piece that ships.

What You Should Steal

Adopt a disclosure standard before a regulator or a journalist forces one on you. Every piece of AI-assisted content should disclose the role of AI and the human editor of record. The disclosure costs you nothing in trust — readers already assume it. The absence of disclosure, once exposed, costs you the brand.