The chief executive of Sports Illustrated magazine has been sacked after claims it ran articles by fake authors generated using artificial intelligence.
Arena Group, the magazine’s publisher, said it had fired Ross Levinsohn in an attempt to “improve the operational efficiency and revenue of the company”.
It made no reference to an investigation by Futurism, a tech news website, last month that found Sports Illustrated had published articles generated by AI, with headshots of fake journalists attached.
The publisher denied it had used AI to produce articles, claiming the content had been created by a third-party advertising company, AdVon Commerce. It said the fictitious names attached to the stories were pseudonyms, not AI-generated personas.
The investigation found a profile page of a product reviewer, Sora Tanaka, who does not exist but was described as a journalist who “has always been a fitness guru, and loves to try different foods and drinks”.
