In fascinating research, new polling from the research and advocacy nonprofit AI Policy Institute (AIPI) found that 80 percent of Americans think presenting AI content as human-made should be illegal. Specifically, here’s the question they asked: Sports Illustrated recently acknowledged that it used AI to write stories and assigned them fake bylines. Do you believe this practice should be legal or illegal? Yes, they’re referring to the story we broke about Sports Illustrated publishing articles bylined by fake authors with made-up names and AI-generated headshots. It’s fascinating stuff, but we should point out that AIPI’s phrasing of the question is a bit scrambled. Though there’s no dispute that Sports Illustrated’s authors were fake and had AI-generated headshots, the magazine and its owner have denied that AI was used to generate the actual content of the posts, saying they were provided by a third-party contractor called AdVon Commerce, which also denied that AI was used to generate the articles themselves. (Our sources, though, allege that at least some of the articles themselves were produced using AI.) That caveat aside, the poll results feel like an interesting glimpse into the public’s perception of the media’s use of AI. An overwhelming number of Americans clearly aren’t thrilled with the idea of publishers spoonfeeding them AI-generated content — let alone content bylined by AI-generated writers — without proper disclosures. And as we move further into an era that could well be defined by AI, that doesn’t seem like a data point publishers should ignore. According to the survey results,…80 Percent of Americans Think Presenting AI Content as Human-Made Should Be Illegal