This study looks at SI.com and how much AI content exists on the Review sections of their site.
It was recently reported that fake authors with AI-generated headshots had written reviews that were suspected of being AI-generated.
The ArenaGroup (which owns Sports Illustrated) contracted with AdVon commerce to create review articles for a separate section of their site using a strategy often called “parasite SEO”.
“Parasite SEO” is when a company with a reputable domain (such as Sports Illustrated) partners with a content provider to create articles (“parasites”) that can rank well in Google because of the reputable domain (“host”). The quality of the content might be lower than other sites but because of the authority of the domain, in the eyes of Google the content will rank well. In the case of the articles at SI.com they made money from visitors who followed the recommendation of the SI.com article and purchased a product via an affiliate link.
These review articles were published at si.com/review/ under multiple fake author names.
As of June 17, 2022 the SI.com/review site was redirected to the similar SI.com/showcase section of SI.com.
On the showcase section of the site, SI.com makes it clear that their editorial staff are not involved in the creation of this content:
SI makes it clear that they earn money as an affiliate referring people to purchase products - https://www.minutemedia.com/policies/terms-and-conditions-si
Questions Remain…
It is clear that authors were faked but… was AI used to generate these review articles?
The source states “‘The content is absolutely AI-generated,’ the second source said, ‘no matter how much they say that it's not.’”
Sports Illustrated and AdVon’s statement says all content was human-generated:
“AdVon has assured us that all of the articles in question were written and edited by humans. According to AdVon, their writers, editors, and researchers create and curate content and follow a policy that involves using both counter-plagiarism and counter-AI software on all content”
We know fake people were used to create reviews, but further questions need to be answered…
That is what we are going to look into.
Specifically, looking at the use of AI at the 2 product review sections of SI.com
The article identified in the Futurism article written by a fake author “Play Like a Pro With The Best Full-Size Volleyballs” when run through an AI checker comes back with 100% confidence the introduction was AI-generated (see scan).
We will explore 2 parts of SI.com. Specifically their review sub-sites at…
Method for SI.com/Review
Method for SI.com/Showcase
As mentioned above we identified all URLs at both the older SI.com/review section of SI (using archive.org) and the new review article section of SI.com at SI.com/showcase.
Then analyzed specific sections using Originality.ai AI detection of each article:
We split each article into sections because an introduction being AI written is potentially less concerning to a reader when compared to online reviews being AI-generated.
Most articles follow a similar format shown below…
261 review article URLs at SI.com/Review were able to have their content from Archive.org analyzed using the AI checker at Originality.ai.
Most of these articles were published and likely written from mid 2021 to mid 2022. Although ChatGPT was not yet launched, many other AI writing tools such as Jasper.ai were available during this period of time AI detection and widespread adoption was significantly less prevalent during this time.
Below we show the % of articles that were suspected of being AI-Written vs Human-Written for each section:
Findings…
Shockingly, almost 70% of the introductions are suspected of being AI-generated!
It looks highly likely that an AI writing tool using GPT-3 such as Jasper.ai was used for the creation of a meaningful number of the Review articles.
Could these be false positives? Unlikely, as our false positive rate is tested to be ~2.5% - see accuracy study here.
Potentially the editorial standards at the old SI.com/review section of the site were different and the new SI.com/showcase section of the site requires reviews to be human-written with more controls in place.
There is significantly more data for us to review with SI.com/showcase since the site was launched in the middle of 2022 and is still live.
986 Review articles at SI.com/Showcase were analyzed and below are the findings…
AI appears to be used in both the introduction and article body.
I think the BIG finding from this study is that there is minimal/no sign of AI being used to write the product “review” section of each article. SI.com and their contracted 3rd party editorial team seem to have effectively implemented controls to ensure at least the product review portion of the articles are written by humans.
In today’s online society, a question all publishers need to wrestle is: “When is it okay to use and not disclose that content is AI-generated.”
Arena Group is not alone in allowing AI-written content to be published on their sites!
In fact we completed another study looking at 16 large publishers using AI writing like the Arena Group, Vox Media, DotDash Meredith, Conde Nast, etc that have 165 websites which dominate Google. 45% of the websites had statistically significant amounts of AI generated content on them.
See Extent of AI Writing on Large Publishers - Study
