AdVon's AI-generated reviews with fake authors ran on Sports Illustrated and USA Today

In late 2023, product review articles on Gannett sites including USA Today looked AI-generated (Gannett insisted they were human-written and blamed a third-party marketing firm); a month later, similar reviews appeared on Sports Illustrated — and Futurism discovered the authors' headshots were for sale on an AI photo website. In both cases The Verge traced the content to AdVon Commerce, a marketing firm that boasts of AI-powered products and whose owners worked to scrub their names from the internet.

The Verge traced AdVon to CEO Ben Faw, cofounder of BestReviews, and chronicled a pattern long predating AI: in 2018 a marketing piece about Meghan Markle's purse appeared inside the Chicago Tribune via BestReviews' access (Faw did not dispute it promoted a friend's startup); in mid-2019 thousands of backlinks to Faw-connected companies — including Beauty Bakerie, where he sat on the board — were found inside BestReviews articles. Faw blamed the outside SEO firm Alan Morgan Group; a fraud lawsuit alleged he was secretly employed by it with a one-third stake while at BestReviews.

The AI chapter ended badly for its hosts: Sports Illustrated said it cut ties with the company that produced the reviews, and in January 2024 its newsroom was gutted by mass layoffs, with much of the staff rehired only after the parent company found a new publisher. Gannett continued to maintain the contested content was produced by humans.

Sports Illustrated cut ties with AdVon; its newsroom absorbed mass layoffs in January 2024; publishers spent months defending AI junk on their own sites.

Authors who did not exist — their headshots stock AI images — made the deception undeniable and the scandal unavoidable.

Publishers outsourced commerce content to a marketing firm without editorial visibility, then had to publicly defend the output.

The scheme followed a yearslong pattern (the 2018 Tribune article, the 2019 backlink scheme) before reaching AI-generated content.

AdVon's model monetized borrowed publisher authority: links and bylines on trusted sites for search placement.

Renting your reputation to a vendor you don't inspect converts someone else's shortcut into your scandal — the byline is yours even when the author isn't real.

Sports Illustrated cut ties with AdVon and gutted its newsroom in January 2024 before rehiring much of the staff under a new publisher; Gannett defended the content as human-written; The Verge documented AdVon's owners scrubbing their names from the internet.