Sports Illustrated editor defends company following AI plagiarism controversy

Last week, Sports Illustrated removed an article and the author’s entire profile after claims that the author had plagiarized their work using AI.

On Wednesday, SI editor-in-chief Steve Cannella offered an explanation for what happened and what the outlet is doing about it.

As part of their prediction market vertical, Parker Loverich wrote, “Who is really winning on Kalshi parlays according to the data,” which, as reported by Futurism, essentially regurgitated the same information and analysis as a Sportico article written days earlier but failed to offer any attribution. After one of the authors of that article called SI out for “stealing entire stories from people without credit, seemingly using AI,” Sports Illustrated took down the offending article. Loverich’s profile on SI.com was also deleted (Loverich also took down his X account and LinkedIn profile).

“The predictions market On SI site was managed by an independent publisher who is expected to abide by Sports Illustrated’s editorial guidelines,” An SI spokesperson told Awful Announcing. “Sports Illustrated became aware of a violation of those guidelines in regards to the use of AI and immediately took steps internally to address this violation, including cutting ties with the publisher.”

Cannella expanded on that in an interview with Ryan Glasspiegel at Front Office Sports.

“This is one of our On SI sites,” he said. “As you know, this is a network of sites that are run by independent publishers on our domain, specializing in coverage of specific teams, schools, or niche verticals. And this was one of those sites where a writer, frankly, did some things he should not have. And it was brought to our attention, and we discovered it. We dealt with it. We have a zero-tolerance policy for publishers who don’t live up to our editorial guidelines. And when we discovered this, we immediately took steps to remove the content and remove the writer and the publisher of that site.”

Cannella noted that the company’s editorial guidelines say that “stories are expected to be created by humans, not AI.”

The EIC went on to explain that the On SI sites, of which there are around 200, are “independant publishers who work on a rev-share” and are not expected to be identified the same way as a Sports Illustrated staff writer or senior editor, such as Chris Mannix or Albert Breer.

“We do have guidelines in place on how that content and the creators should be identified,” he said.

This isn’t the first time the once-proud brand has been caught up in an AI scandal. Futurism reported in 2023 that SI had published multiple articles by fake, AI-generated authors, with at least some of the articles themselves produced by AI. The company’s use of AI was condemned by many in the media, including its own writers.

However, that’s an easier delineation to make internally than it is to the outside world. A Sports Illustrated-branded site is Sports Illustrated to many readers, regardless of intention or contributor tax status. And as has been demonstrated many times since the brand has adopted this kind of contributor model, the bar for forgiveness from audiences and the industry remains high, given the outlet’s history and meaning to so many.