Michael Schumacher’s family is planning legal action against a German weekly magazine over an ‘interview’ with the seven-time Formula One world champion that was generated by artificial intelligence.

A spokesperson for the Schumacher family, asked by Reuters for a comment on Wednesday, pointed to published reports of legal action.

The Ferrari great has not been seen in public since he suffered a serious brain injury in a skiing accident on a family holiday in the French Alps in December 2013.

The family has guarded his privacy since, with access limited to those closest to him and little information given about his condition.

The latest edition of Die Aktuelle ran a front cover with a picture of a smiling Schumacher and the headline promising ‘Michael Schumacher – the first interview’.

The strapline added ‘it sounds deceptively real’.

Inside, it emerged that the supposed quotes had been produced by a chatbot, presumed to be the website Character.AI, but that was not made explicitly clear without reading the article.

On page it billed the interview as the Formula One sensation’s first since his life-changing accident, but then asked ‘is that really our Schumi who is speaking?’.

It is not the first time the magazine has been accused of misleading readers over a story about the athlete. In November 2014, a year after his accident, Die Aktuelle printed a photo of Mr Schumacher above the headline ‘He sits in the Sun!’, but the image was originally taken in January 2013.

In a 2021 Netflix documentary, Mr Schumacher’s wife Corinna said: ‘We live together at home. We do therapy. We do everything we can to make Michael better and to make sure he’s comfortable, and to simply make him feel our family, our bond.

‘We’re trying to carry on as a family, the way Michael liked it and still does. And we are getting on with our lives.

‘”Private is private,” as he always said. It’s very important to me that he can continue to enjoy his private life as much as possible. Michael always protected us, and now we are protecting Michael.’

Mr Schumacher’s son Mick is currently the Mercedes reserve driver in Formula One after losing his seat at Haas at the end of last season.

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