Sports Illustrated deleted an author — and his entire archive of articles — from its website following allegations of AI plagiarism.
Last week, the sports news site Sportico published an article featuring an original analysis of parlay bets made via the prediction market Kalshi. Two days later, on May 15, Sports Illustrated published an article — titled “Who is really winning on Kalshi parlays according to the data” — that regurgitated the same figures, without ever attributing the analysis to Sportico, as would be the normal and ethical thing to do.
The Sports Illustrated piece only mentioned the other sports outlet when repeating a quote given to Sportico for a related article published back in 2025 — a quote that Sportico, tellingly, had called back to in its more recent piece.
Sportico editor Dan Bernstein, who bylined the original piece, took to X on Sunday to accuse Sports Illustrated of plagiarism, suggesting in the post that AI may have been used to generate the piece in question.
“The husk of the Sports Illustrated brand is stealing entire stories from people without credit, seemingly using AI,” wrote Bernstein. “This becomes very obvious when it’s stealing data only you’ve reported!”
Soon after Bernstein’s allegations were made public, Sports Illustrated deleted the article in question, which was attributed to a writer named Parker Loverich. Profiles associated with Loverich quickly disappeared from LinkedIn and X. Loverich didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
We reached out to Sports Illustrated‘s owner Minute Media to ask about the article’s erasure, and whether AI may have been used to generated the deleted piece. Minute Media has yet to respond, but shortly after we reached out, Loverich’s entire profile — along with all of his articles — were scrubbed from Sports Illustrated‘s website.
Speaking to Futurism, Bernstein shared that it was “frustrating” to see his work plagiarized by a high-trafficked brand like Sports Illustrated.
“If someone was plagiarizing my work and no one was actually seeing it, then like it would be semi-annoying,” said Bernstein. “But the idea of a plagiarized version showing up in Google over my own version, or someone seeing the plagiarized version and then citing the plagiarized version instead of my own, that’s kind of frustrating.”
The company’s hasty move to scrub an entire writer and their backlog from Sports Illustrated‘s site is significant in light of the iconic sports brand’s not-too-distant history of AI scandal. Back in 2023, Futurism published an investigation revealing that Sports Illustrated, then owned by The Arena Group, had published a huge number of product review articles bylined by completely fabricated writers with AI-generated profile pictures.
The Arena Group said the articles had been published to Sports Illustrated‘s site by a third-party content provider called AdVon Commerce; former employees of AdVon told Futurism that the company was secretly using AI to generate large amounts of content. When we reached out to the Arena Group about the content, the entire section of the Sports Illustrated site where the articles had appeared was swiftly deleted.
Following Futurism‘sreporting, several Arena Group executives were fired, including the company’s then-CEO. The Arena Group soon lost control of Sports Illustrated entirely, and the historic brand ended up in the portfolio of Minute Media.
Asked about Minute Media’s hurried response to scrub the writer’s history without a formal response to the plagiarism allegation, Bernstein added that “it would be nice” if the owner of the brand “took some sort of responsibility.”
“Just because the this account was deleted, I would not be surprised if this is happening elsewhere, or if this is going to happen again,” said Bernstein. “It feels like it’s more of a systemic problem than this one incident.”
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More on AI and journalism: New York Times Issues Stern Warning to Its Freelance Writers About AI Use
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