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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 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.”
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