Fighting fakery

Sports Illustrated website offering profile of reporter Drew Ortiz.

Have you ever read a story in a magazine and wondered who the reporter was who wrote it? Well, I have, often. More specifically, imagine that you were reading an edition of Sports Illustrated a few weeks back. You saw a story that caught your attention written by Drew Ortiz. If you then searched the Sports Illustrated website to find out more about Ortiz, here’s the message you’d have found:

“Nowadays, there is rarely a weekend that goes by where Drew isn’t out camping, hiking, or just back on his parents’ farm,” the SI site said.

Well, the mystery around Drew Ortiz and his SI story intrigued reporters at a New York-based science and technology publication called Futurism. They did some checking and discovered that the photo of Drew Ortiz could be traced to an Artificial Intelligence image website with the description: “neutral white young-adult male with short brown hair and blue eyes.” (more…)