The only thing a little odd about Drew Ortiz was that he didn’t exist.
He was fake. He was a writer-bot. He was AI SI, FYI. Although, SI didn’t tell me that. They tried to palm him off as real. His author photo came from a website that sells fake headshots. As the website Futurism revealed on Monday, SI has tragically deleted Drew and his entire life’s work.
Must’ve been a real blow to mom and dad back home on the fake farm.
Which means that nobody gets to read Drew’s bon mots, which sounded like somebody in Uzbekistan talking to Google Translate. Volleyball, he said, “can be a little tricky to get into, especially without an actual ball to practice with.”
He was my go-to guy on the sport: “Wilson’s a pretty popular brand,” although “it’s not exactly the most famous in the sport.” Which is very true, except for the fact a Wilson volleyball starred in a blockbuster Tom Hanks movie.
Anyway, Drew is dead now, and SI didn’t even have the decency to print his obotuary. I’ll miss him. We had a lot in common. In those website CAPTCHA things, neither of us can figure out which of the stupid boxes contain telephone poles.
Once Drew had been erased like a Russian general, he was replaced with a young woman named Sora Tanaka, who “loves to try different foods and drinks,” SI readers were told. Soon, poof, Sora was vaporized, too. Droids aren’t good at digesting lots of foods and drinks anyway.
SI’s parent company, the Arena Group, did the responsible thing: They blamed the whole mess all on somebody else. The bot pieces, they said, were “licensed content” from a third-party company called AdVon Commerce, which in turn said, uh, no, well, see, all those articles were penned by actual humans who may have used “pseudo names … to protect author privacy.”
I can see that. You don’t want Big Volleyball coming after you.
Newspapers are also letting machines do their reporting. Last summer, the Columbus Dispatch used it to write up high school football games, which stinks because covering high school football is how I got my first break in the business. There goes those jobs. And it isn’t just in sports. Headline: “News Corp using AI to produce 3,000 Australian local news stories a week.”
Journalism is getting faker than Velveeta. You can’t even trust football sideline reports. Charissa Thompson, a Fox Sports NFL host who used to work the sidelines, admitted on a podcast recently (before later issuing a lame clarification) that if she couldn’t get a coach to talk to her at halftime, she’d just make up his quotes. “No coach is gonna get mad if I say, ‘Hey, we need to stop hurting ourselves. We need to be better on third down,’” she said. “Like, they’re not gonna correct me on that. I’m like, it’s fine, I’ll just make up the report.”
Wait. You’re saying instead of all those years quoting Bill Belichick droning, “We need to protect the football” I could’ve had him saying, “If my guys don’t stop dropping the football, I’m gonna drop a Steinway on their heads”?
I bring this up only because the food that democracy feeds on is truth. The media’s job is to deliver that truth. If readers and viewers can’t trust us, then it all comes apart like a first-grade macaroni tree.
At the real SI, not the one where the remaining humans are furious, we lived to write the truth. If we had to hire a crazed ex-Vietnam War pilot to fly us through a blinding snowstorm to get to East Antarctica to interview the greatest living mountain climber, fine. All that mattered was that the story was good and it held up to squadrons of fact-checkers, most of whom would double-check their own spouse’s wedding vows while at the altar. Would’ve been a helluva lot easier to just ask ChatGPT to do it and go to the bar.
But don’t feel bad for my boy, Drew. He’s going to be fine. He’s already got a job filling out the crowd at Trump’s next inauguration.
