On November 27, 2023, Futurism published an investigation reporting that Sports Illustrated had been running articles under the bylines of writers who appeared not to exist, complete with headshots that were listed for sale on a site that sells AI-generated profile photos. One of those personas, “Drew Ortiz,” had a bio saying he had spent much of his life outdoors, and a photo that the marketplace listed as a “neutral white young-adult male with short brown hair and blue eyes.” According to Futurism, after it asked for comment the profiles were deleted, and it documented a pattern of author names being removed, replaced with new ones, and old articles reassigned without any editor’s note. The magazine’s union said publicly that it was horrified.
The Arena Group, which published Sports Illustrated, said the articles in question were product reviews that were licensed from an outside company, AdVon Commerce. According to the Arena Group, AdVon had assured it the work was written by humans and had used pen names for some articles, and the Arena Group said it removed the content and ended the partnership. Futurism’s sources disputed the claim that the content was human-written. That detail matters more than the AI angle itself, because it points to the structure behind the story: Sports Illustrated’s newsroom was not the only party producing what ran under its name. The brand belonged to one company, its publishing was run by a second under license, and some of what it published came from a third-party vendor.
That structure has an origin story with a price tag. In May 2019, Authentic Brands Group, a brand-management company, agreed to buy the Sports Illustrated brand from Meredith Corporation for $110 million. Meredith had acquired Time Inc. in 2018 and decided to sell SI because it did not fit its lifestyle properties. In June 2019, Authentic licensed the right to publish SI’s editorial operations to theMaven, now The Arena Group, under a 10-year contract. Authentic’s model is to own brands and license them to operating partners, and the AI-bylines scandal happened inside that licensing arrangement, not outside it.
The arrangement came apart within weeks of the scandal. The Arena Group missed a $3.75 million quarterly licensing payment to Authentic in early January 2024. On January 19, 2024, Authentic terminated the license, and the Arena Group then laid off Sports Illustrated’s editorial staff. In March 2024, Authentic licensed the brand to Minute Media in a 10-year deal, and the two companies said some of the affected staff would be rehired.
The sequence is almost too clean as a parable. Meredith was paid $110 million for the name. The buyer kept the brand and relicensed it. An operator under license used a content vendor that, by the operator’s own account, relied on pen names. And when the licensing payment stopped arriving, the journalists were the ones who lost their jobs, not the brand owner, not the operator, and not the vendor.
Nothing in the public record suggests anyone in that chain set out to destroy sports journalism. What the record shows is a brand treated as an asset that can be licensed in layers, where the people who built its reputation over seven decades are exposed whenever any layer fails. Authentic still owned the Sports Illustrated brand as of the most recent reporting available, with Minute Media publishing it under the 2024 license.
Vince Douglas Gregory is the ‘petulant puppet master’ of a sports media landscape addicted to scripted rage and performance art. As the architect of VDG Sports, he bypasses the corporate talking heads to expose the unfiltered truth behind the narratives.
An unstable thinker and astute scholar, Vince thrives on dismantling the mediocre click-bait addicts who trade reality for engagement. If you want boring stats, go elsewhere. If you want the raw reality of the game, you’re in the right place. Consider yourself warned.