Nobody at Sports Illustrated sat in a meeting and decided to destroy 70 years of editorial trust. That's the part I keep coming back to when I tell this story.
In November 2023, a report found that Sports Illustrated had published product reviews under author names like "Drew Ortiz" and "Sora Tanaka" — names that traced back to AI-generated headshots sold on stock photo marketplaces. The people didn't exist. When journalists asked about it, the profiles quietly disappeared, then reappeared under new fake names, with articles silently reattributed and no editor's note explaining any of it. The magazine's parent company blamed a third-party content vendor. Within weeks, the CEO and three other executives were gone.
Here's what I find genuinely instructive about this case, separate from the scandal of it: this almost certainly wasn't a top-down decision to deceive readers. It was a governance gap. A vendor, several steps removed from the newsroom, was producing content at scale, and nobody with real authority over the brand was watching closely enough to catch what was happening until an outside journalist did it for them. That's not a story about AI being evil. It's a story about what happens when a brand scales its output faster than it scales its oversight.
I built my entire research focus around exactly this gap, because I think it's about to become the defining brand risk of this decade, and almost nobody is treating it that way yet.
Naming the thing: Brand Drift
I call this phenomenon Brand Drift — the gradual gap that opens up between what a brand says it stands for and what its actual output, increasingly AI-generated or AI-assisted, is doing day to day. The dangerous part isn't that it's dramatic. It's that it's quiet. Nobody wakes up and decides to let a brand drift. It's a tone that's slightly off in one automated reply. A value that stops showing up consistently because nobody explicitly told the system to protect it. A vendor relationship nobody's auditing closely enough. And then, eighteen months later — or in Sports Illustrated's case, the moment an outside reporter went looking — the brand doesn't feel like itself anymore, and everyone's left asking how it happened.
Why this isn't just an "AI ethics" question
Most writing about AI and brands lives at the level of broad AI ethics — bias, fairness, safety, at a societal scale. My research asks something narrower and, I think, more immediately useful: specifically, what happens to a brand's identity and the trust it's built once AI starts producing its communications at scale, and how do you govern that well. It's a smaller question than "is AI ethical." It's also a question an actual founder or marketing director can act on this quarter, not eventually.
That's the whole reason I built the BIG Framework as the practical arm of Human-Centered Brand Governance — three things a business needs to be actively watching, together, not separately:
Brand Integrity — is the output still saying what the brand actually means, or has it quietly gone generic to make production faster?
Intelligent Human Oversight — is a real, accountable person checking the decisions that matter, all the way down the vendor chain, or has "AI produced it" become an excuse for nobody checking at all?
Governance for Human Flourishing — and this is the piece most AI governance conversations skip — is this actually good for the people on the other end of it, readers, customers, employees, or is it just efficient for the company's bottom line?
Sports Illustrated's failure sits cleanly across all three. Integrity broke the moment fabricated bylines started appearing. Oversight broke somewhere in the handoff to a vendor nobody was auditing closely. And "good for the humans on the other end" was never really part of the equation — readers were being quietly misled about who, or what, had actually written what they were reading.
Why I'm studying this across four very different countries
The academic side of this work looks at Brand Identity Governance across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Estonia — and I chose those four very deliberately, not randomly. The UAE and Saudi Arabia because they're moving incredibly fast on AI adoption and national brand-building simultaneously, which makes the phenomenon extremely visible. Morocco because it's my own context, and because Gulf-versus-Western comparisons miss an entire layer of nuance without it. And Estonia because it's almost the opposite case — small, hyper-digitized, a completely different relationship to identity and technology — which makes it what researchers call a disconfirming case: a place that tests whether a theory actually holds up outside the exact context it was built from, instead of just confirming what I already expected to find.
I'm building on three theoretical foundations to make sense of all this: Dynamic Capabilities Theory, because it explains how organizations sense and respond to changes in their environment — exactly what's needed to catch drift before it becomes damage, rather than after a journalist finds it. Brand Identity Theory, drawing on Aaker, Kapferer, and Keller, because you can't meaningfully talk about "drift" without a rigorous definition of what identity actually is in the first place. And Cultural Dimensions Theory, from Hofstede, because trust and authenticity are read differently depending on where you are, and I refuse to hand any client a framework that quietly assumes a Western default.
I approach all of it through what's called critical realism — which, stripped of the jargon, means I believe Brand Drift is a real, structural phenomenon, not just individual opinion or perception. But I also stay honest that my access to it is always partial, shaped by the specific cases and contexts I'm actually able to study. That combination — real structure, honestly partial view — is, I think, the only intellectually honest way to build a framework meant to travel across cultures instead of just describing one of them.
Why this matters for your business specifically, right now
You might be reading this thinking Sports Illustrated is a media company, this is a media problem, not yours. I'd push back on that gently. Every wellness brand, EdTech founder, and growing business I talk to across this region is already using AI for a meaningful share of their brand touchpoints — content, customer replies, even initial sales conversations — usually with far less oversight than a legacy publisher, not more. Everyone assumes governance is a "big enterprise" problem. It's actually the smaller, faster-moving businesses where drift compounds fastest, precisely because nobody's watching for it and there's no PR department to catch it before a customer does.
What to actually do about it, starting this week
You don't need a research team or a governance department. You need three honest habits:
Audit anything AI-touched, including anything a vendor produces on your behalf. Sports Illustrated's failure traveled through a third party. If you outsource any content or customer-facing communication, "we didn't write it ourselves" is not oversight — it's the exact gap that broke this story open.
Name what your brand would never say, and check for it. Specific, written down, not vibes. It's the fastest way to catch drift before a stranger catches it for you.
Put a real, accountable human in the loop on anything that reaches a customer. Not as a bottleneck. As the thing that keeps efficiency from quietly becoming erosion.
I hope, honestly, that "is our AI protecting or damaging our brand identity" becomes as standard a question as "are our finances in order" — asked routinely, not after the fact. Right now it barely exists as a category most businesses have named yet. I'd like to be part of the reason it becomes one, one client, one paper, one very obsessive research rabbit hole at a time.
Wondering where your own brand might already be drifting? The free Brand Bloom Audit covers exactly this blind spot. Take the audit →