In a bewildering turn of events, Google appears to have quietly struck a deal with one of the most controversial companies using AI to produce content online: AdVon Commerce, the contractor linked to Sports Illustrated’s explosive AI scandal. As we reported in November, Sports Illustrated had been quietly publishing large numbers of strangely-written articles by writers that didn’t actually exist. The bylines were furnished with detailed fictional biographies, like an ersatz author named Drew Ortiz whose author page claimed he frequently spent weekends “back on his parents’ farm” — but whose profile picture we found listed on a site that sold AI-generated headshots, where he was described as a “neutral white young-adult male with short brown hair and blue eyes.” Sports Illustrated’s publisher at the time, a company called The Arena Group — which subsequently fired its CEO and then lost the rights to publish Sports Illustrated entirely — responded by deleting all the fake writers’ articles and blaming them on AdVon, with which it said it was cutting all ties. (AdVon didn’t dispute that the bylines were fake or that their profile pictures had been created with AI, but insisted the Sports Illustrated articles had been written by real humans; however, it conceded that it had created AI-generated material for other clients.) In the wake of the Sports Illustrated scandal, Google announced a crackdown on the AI-generated slime flooding its search results, calling it “scaled content abuse” and decrying the use of “generative AI tools or other similar…Google Appears to Have Partnered With the Company Behind Sports Illustrated’s Fake, AI-Generated Writers