In 1936, Stewart Scheftel began writing articles from his garage, having no anticipation of how far his project now named Sports Illustrated would go.¹ The last 87 years have been full of immense growth for the company, earning it a popularly recognizable name. However, has this growth met its end? The company has recently been accused of publishing works generated by Artificial Intelligence. This accusation, whether found true or not, has set one of writer’s biggest fears into stone: losing their jobs to a robot.

Sports Illustrated gets supplied articles by numerous organizations. AdVon Commerce, a company who writes and sends articles out, is one of these vendors. SI and AdVon have been working together for some time, forming a base level of trust between the two, or so it seemed. Futurism, a company who publishes texts about science and technology, is the plaintiff in this case. They were the ones who formulated the accusations that Sports Illustrated is now being held to.²

Sports Illustrated has a history that deals with other accusations of the same sort. Therefore, Futurism's claim that SI used artificial intelligence to create fake writers, photos, and articles does not come as a surprise.³ Arena Group, the parent corporation of Sports Illustrated, asserted that these were incorrect. Ross Levinsohn, a top executive of Arena Group, explained, “The articles in question were product reviews and were licensed content from an external third-party company. AdVon assured us that all of the articles in question were written and edited by humans.”⁴

Fortunately, Arena Group has broken its ties with AdVon. Additionally, Sports Illustrated has removed all the articles that have been accused of Artificial intelligence. Mitch Goldrich, an editor at Sports Illustrated, saying the magazine has begun,"Real damage to the credibility of the hardworking humans I have been honored to work with for the past 9 years".⁵ Staffers and editors of many newspapers are enraged with this growing use of Artificial Intelligence. Websites have now evolved to be able to write essays for high school students.

As seen, using Artificial Intelligence can be detrimental to your credibility. We believe using AI to ghost write your texts can be a serious problem. Although AI in specific situations can be helpful, using and passing it off as your own is considered plagiarism. It should not be used as an entire official work. As writers this truly increases our fearful views of the future technology that is ready to emerge. The ability that these mechanisms hold is able to affect our world in ways that many individuals have yet to grasp. Personally, the two of us see Artificial Intelligence as a way of corrupting the creativity and thought process of people like us.

This isn’t to diminish the amount of profound doors opened up by this technology. There are plenty of benefits that AI brings, although those do not outweigh the negatives. AI’s ability to erase jobs and creative endeavors from millions upon millions of people has prompted fear within us. Trepidation and anxiety form when seeing our associates take advantage of Artificial Intelligence for it shocks us with a sudden new reality. In the end, AI is not a toy to be played with.