Five of Sports Illustrated's product reviewers were AI-generated people

Drew Ortiz's farmhouse childhood never happened

Drew Ortiz's author page on Sports Illustrated ran under the title "Product Reviews Team Member Drew Ortiz," beside a headshot of a young man with short brown hair and blue eyes.¹ The bio said he "grew up in a farmhouse, surrounded by woods, fields, and a creek," and would rather spend a weekend outdoors than anywhere else.¹ No one by that name has lived any of it. The photo is a stock listing sold on an AI face marketplace called generated.photos, cataloged there as a "neutral white young-adult male with short brown hair and blue eyes."² Outside Sports Illustrated's own pages, Drew Ortiz leaves no trace at all: no social media, no other byline, nothing.²

Ortiz was not the only one. Futurism, the outlet that found him, counted five invented bylines across two Arena Group-owned sites. Sora Tanaka quietly replaced Ortiz at the same Sports Illustrated author-page address, and three more ran on the finance site TheStreet: Domino Abrams, Nicole Merrifield, and Denise McNamara.² An archived copy of Domino Abrams' TheStreet profile, with its own stock headshot and a biography about a stay-at-home dad who is "a pro at home cleaning and maintenance," is dated October 2021, two years before anyone caught it.³

AdVon Commerce, an outside content company Arena Group said it licensed the reviews from, supplied all five personas along with the copy that ran under them.⁴ The arrangement was disclosed, technically. An archived Sports Illustrated review under Ortiz's byline carries a line at the bottom of the page: "This content is created by a 3rd party. The Sports Illustrated editorial staff are not involved in the creation of this content."⁵ The byline at the top read like any staff writer's. The disclosure at the bottom, in small type most readers never reach, said it wasn't.

Arena Group's word for it was a pen name

Arena Group, which then operated Sports Illustrated, answered Futurism the next day, November 28, 2023. Its statement called the report "not accurate" in one sentence and confirmed most of it in the next. AdVon had "assured" the company the articles were "written and edited by humans." But Arena Group had also learned that AdVon "had writers use a pen or pseudo name in certain articles to protect author privacy," a practice it said it did not condone.⁴

A pen name protects a real writer who simply doesn't want their own name on a byline. Drew Ortiz's headshot isn't a disguised photo of that writer. It's a stock image licensed from a marketplace catalog, attached to a childhood, a hobby, and a personality that came from nowhere.¹² Arena Group's statement borrowed AdVon's word for a bigger fabrication than the word admits.

Whether AI wrote the words is still unproven

Futurism's report made a second, thinner claim: that some of the article text itself, not only the byline, was AI-generated. That rests on "two people with direct knowledge of the company's operations," both unnamed.² NPR's follow-up the next morning repeated it, reporting that "some unnamed journalists at SI say some of the articles themselves were fake," but the correspondent traced the claim back to Futurism's own anonymous sourcing rather than checking it independently.⁶ One outlet's anonymous sourcing, retold by a second outlet, is one confirmation, not two.

Arena Group denied it in the same November 28 statement, saying AdVon's writers used counter-plagiarism and counter-AI software.⁴ AdVon went further five months later, after a second Futurism investigation found that the company's AI writing tool, MEL, had drafted articles for dozens of other publishers under human bylines. AdVon's statement to Futurism carved Sports Illustrated out by name: "all of the articles provided to Sports Illustrated were authored and edited by human writers." It added that "AdVon's MEL AI tool was not used in content processes until 2023."⁷ The evidence Futurism gathered against AdVon elsewhere, an edit history that compressed a 2,200-word article into five minutes, a content-system tag reading "AI," comes from AdVon's other clients. Nothing that specific has surfaced for a Sports Illustrated article.

That's a different failure than the one CNET's finance desk admitted to a year earlier. There, an AI tool put a real staff byline on an article and got a compound-interest figure wrong, in a way any reader could check against a calculator. This dispute has no wrong number to check. It has a denial on one side and an anonymous source on the other. Only one thing would settle it: an AdVon-side edit log or content-system record for a specific Sports Illustrated article, or a named former employee willing to say how those particular pieces were made.

The firings Arena Group didn't blame on AI

Arena Group pulled the AdVon-supplied content from both sites and ended the vendor relationship while it investigated further, the same November 28 statement said.⁴ The Sports Illustrated union had already spoken. Hours after Futurism's story ran, the union posted that its members were "horrified" by the report and demanded a commitment to stop "publishing computer-written stories by fake people."⁸

Three more Arena Group executives were terminated the following week. On December 11, 2023, the company's board terminated CEO Ross Levinsohn too, replacing him the same day with investor Manoj Bhargava.⁹ Coverage of the firing connected it to the AI scandal almost everywhere it ran. Arena Group's own press release didn't. It cited a board decision "to improve the operational efficiency and revenue of the company" and never mentioned AI, the personas, or Futurism's report at all.¹⁰ That link is the reporting's own connecting of the dots, not a cause either the company or Levinsohn has put a name to.

Both sides have kept their story since. Arena Group's position is that AdVon assured it the writing was human and that AdVon's writers had merely used pen names. AdVon's position, a year later, is that Sports Illustrated specifically got human-written copy and that its AI tool wasn't even in use yet.⁷ Neither company has produced the document that would settle which of them is right.

The same trick still works on a reader today

A hallucinated fact, like CNET's wrong compound-interest number, is a mistake inside real reporting: a real publication, a real byline, one wrong sentence a reader could check and get fixed. Fabricating an author is a different kind of failure. There's no error to catch, because there was never a person behind the byline to hold accountable. The trust a byline is supposed to carry gets borrowed by a name that was never attached to anyone.

That's what a stock AI headshot is for. A marketplace like generated.photos trains a model on real photographs, then generates a photorealistic portrait nobody sat for and licenses it from a catalog instead of a photo shoot.² Attach a biography, and the picture becomes a person a reader has no way to check, because there is nothing behind the name to find.

The Federal Trade Commission's rule against fake reviews, finalized in August 2024 and in effect that October, bars exactly this: a review or testimonial "that misrepresent that they are by someone who does not exist."¹¹ It arrived a year after Sports Illustrated's pages were already down, and it doesn't reach back to punish what already happened. What it's built around is still worth checking for. A byline with no life anywhere else, a headshot that looks a little too generic, a disclosure line sitting a few inches below a name that reads like a staff writer's: Sports Illustrated's five personas had all three.