According to a report by the website Futurism, Sports Illustrated, has been publishing AI-written stories under the bylines of journalists who are not real. The death of journalism has been happening for a while now, this is the latest nail in the coffin.
“There’s a lot,” an anonymous person involved with the creation of the content told Futurism of the fake authors. “I was like, what are they? This is ridiculous. This person does not exist.
“At the bottom [of the page] there would be a photo of a person and some fake description of them like, ‘oh, John lives in Houston, Texas. He loves yard games and hanging out with his dog, Sam.’ Stuff like that. It’s just crazy.”
AI-Generated Content
AI-generated content under the byline of a fake individual with a made up biography and an AI-generated photo. That’s where we are.
Sports Illustrated was once the pinnacle of sports journalism. Home of legendary writers like Frank Deford, Dan Jenkins, Jack McCallum and Ralph Wiley.
Somewhere in the last 30 years the business model for magazines and print journalism began to struggle and eventually crumble. Add in the emergence of the internet and everything changed. The people that ran the business end of media, were focused solely on revenue and as a result the editorial side suffered.
Sports Illustrated is owned by The Arena Group which is owned by Simplify Inventions, a venture capital company. The goal of a VC company is simple, generate return on investments to its limited partners.
Simplify Inventions chairman Manoj Bhargava appeared on New York Stock Exchange programming “Floor Talk” in August and discussed the acquisition of The Arena Group. In the entire 11-minute interview, neither journalism or content was mentioned once. It was all about profitability and how to sell things through a media site.
The largest expense on any company’s balance sheet is employee salary and benefits. If the goal is to have your company as profitable as possible, that is an area you attack to “cut costs.”
Most of what is delivered in sports media today is not nuanced, reported and sourced work. If you’re not actually interviewing subjects, calling sources for verification or doing any reporting, The Arena Group’s contention is, why do we need to pay people for that?
We’ve Been Headed This Way For A While
AI has been “writing” game recaps and similar types of content for a while now. This larger scale move was an attempt to see if AI could be scaled for the purposes of producing content.
Futurism reached out to The Arena Group for comment and initially received no answer. Instead all the AI-generated authors disappeared from Sports Illustrated’s site without explanation.
An Arena Group spokesperson provided a statement where a third-party contractor was blamed for the AI generated content and fake bios.
“Today, an article was published alleging that Sports Illustrated published AI-generated articles. According to our initial investigation, this is not accurate. The articles in question were product reviews and were licensed content from an external, third-party company, AdVon Commerce. A number of AdVon’s e-commerce articles ran on certain Arena websites. We continually monitor our partners and were in the midst of a review when these allegations were raised. AdVon has assured us that all of the articles in question were written and edited by humans. According to AdVon, their writers, editors, and researchers create and curate content and follow a policy that involves using both counter-plagiarism and counter-AI software on all content. However, we have learned that AdVon had writers use a pen or pseudo name in certain articles to protect author privacy — actions we don’t condone — and we are removing the content while our internal investigation continues and have since ended the partnership.”
Are we buying this?
“AdVon had writers use a pen or pseudo name in certain articles to protect author privacy.” Privacy for what? The articles in question were e-commerce product reviews and other licensed content. Why would a human author need privacy or protection from something generic and benign?
Journalism has been dying for quite some time, and the end seems closer now more than ever.
