Quick, call the old American magazines.
Did you say Sports Illustrated? I did it. And I’m not even an athlete. But if you’re of a certain age, you’re familiar with Sports Illustrated. Along with, for example, People, Time and National Geographic, it has long occupied the dentists’ offices, the neighbors’ Doormats and the coffee tables of your life. It is an institution. At one point, he had 3 million subscribers. He has won awards and recognitions. The evening news would dedicate entire segments to the topic of swimwear fashion.
Today it publishes third-rate articles written by AI-generated authors in a dark corner of the internet. It’s a stunning fall for one of the wonderful icons of American sports journalism. So what happened? How did such a prominent publication get here?The responses highlight one of the most urgent and urgent risks posed by the current AI boom.
First, the facts: On Monday, the tech and culture site Futurism published an expose that revealed Sports Illustrated was publishing bizarre and badly written articles attributed to authors that didn’t exist.
The reporters traced the fake authors’ headshots to a website that sells AI-generated images, and sources told them that the stories they allegedly wrote were produced by AI, too. “The content is absolutely AI-generated,” one said, “no matter how much they say that it’s not.” When contacted, Arena Group, Sports Illustrated’s publisher, deleted all of the suspicious content and, in a statement, denied it was created by AI. Arena blamed the mess on AdVon, a third-party company hired to produce content.
The saga has been hotly debated among journalists and media observers, and lamented by former enthusiasts of the iconic brand. Generative AI remains a hot topic, and the question of whether it’s moral – or a smart concept – to use AI has been in the spotlight. center of the conversation.
But it’s worth stepping back and looking at the bigger picture, as well as the situations that led to the use of such incomplete AI in the first place. Because this story is as much about lack of control, sheer laziness, and how relentless corporations in pursuit of profits. Control can erode our cultural establishments like any given technology.
Sports Illustrated was already in dire straits long before Arena brought AI. Faced with the demanding economic situations faced by all print media, the magazine’s revenue and subscriber numbers declined in the 2010s. It was reduced several times, going from a weekly publication schedule to a weekly calendar. It was sold through its owner, Time Inc. , to a company called Authentic Brands Group, or ABG, whose business is making lucrative licensing deals. ABG then sold a 10-year license to publish Sports Illustrated to our new friends. at Grupo Arena.
Thanks to this arrangement, the Sports Illustrated logo now appears on nutritional supplements and in thousands of blog posts. After all, from an editorial standpoint, “Arena’s profit-generating functions are somewhat limited, which encourages the daily production of stories,” as reported by the New York Times. “Hundreds of sites dedicated to individual groups, run by non-staff editors and paying small sums of cash, were created with little oversight and diluted what it meant for ‘Sports Illustrated’ to write anything. “Arena continued to lay off writers and staff, while imposing production quotas on weekly articles. (On the licensing side, business is booming: ABG says it’s doubled Sports Illustrated’s profits. That’s a lot of nutritional pills with the Sports Illustrated logo on them. It also introduced a SI -logo online casino in 2021. )
In other words, Sports Illustrated is run by not one but two vampiric entities with markedly little interest in the magazine’s erstwhile core mission — you know, the thing that made it so beloved in the first place, doing good sports journalism — and every interest in maximizing profits at every opportunity. And they have squeezed the lemon until it was dry.
And that’s where AI comes in.
Not as a tool deployed by forward-thinking leaders eager to embrace the future, but as a last-ditch effort to extract the last remnants of anything that is already broken. Sports Illustrated has already cut its full-time staff. He created a content factory with freelancers who generate content for a fraction of the price and let editorial criteria sink into the gutter. The AI game is an arrow coming out of the quiver itself.
It’s becoming increasingly apparent that for those working in the content generation industry (perhaps worth noting that the original founders of Sports Illustrated would probably bristle at such a term) AI has become popular as a reasonable and utterly unimaginative way to try and generate price with the minimum of imagination. Amount of effort or investment.
Good to know: this year has already been marked by a series of AI-related scandals in the media world. Employees at G/O Media, the publisher of popular sites like Gizmodo and The Onion, rebelled after their publisher implemented generative AI. produce bland, error-ridden content. The once-venerable technology site CNET raised eyebrows (also through futurism, through that) by publishing AI-generated stories without revealing them as such. BuzzFeed controversially announced that it would use AI to generate posts like its branded quizzes, and then disbanded its data department to human staff.
More recently, Gannett, the publisher of USA Today and many other newspapers, has been accused of publishing AI-generated review content; Interestingly, he also blamed AdVon, the same company that Sports Illustrated singled out in its report on the matter.
All of these stories have one main thing in common: each of the media outlets in question faced demanding economic situations and went through an owner whose interest was not to produce a quality publication but to comply with the set of rules to maximize profits and minimize staff. As with SI, everyone was in a desperate scenario before AI entered the equation.
G/O Media, formerly GMG Media, formerly Gawker Media, had gone bankrupt following a malicious lawsuit funded through Silicon Valley titan Peter Thiel, renewed and sold to Univision, then sold to a personal equity firm, Great Hill Partners. To maximize revenue, Great Hill will lay off staff, introduce autoplay classifieds that involve spam, and ask staff to write more slideshows, forcing readers to click on more times than regular articles. In short, a purely for-profit timeline: one that came here at the direct expense of staff and readers, was already in place long before the publisher started meddling with AI.
When he did it despite everything, adding to publishing an article whose sole objective was to list the “Star Wars” videos in order and getting the order wrong, it caused a huge stir.
Similarly, CNET has been hurting for years. Once a powerhouse of tech media, it was acquired by CBS for $1.8 billion in 2008, then was sold to a little-known private equity company based in South Carolina called Red Ventures. The Verge describes its business model as “straightforward and explicit: it publishes content designed to rank highly in Google search for ‘high-intent’ queries and then monetizes that traffic with lucrative affiliate links.” AI was used, it is believed, to streamline and maximize that process.
CNET and G/O are now owned by personal equity firms, and much has been written about the crisis for journalism of handing over the keys to such corporations; An educational article even quantified the damage. That’s considerable.
As a journalist, all of this gets me down: I did a bit of work for Gizmodo and was once an avid reader of Gawker, Deadspin, and AV Club, all of which have been destroyed. BuzzFeed News won a Pulitzer and was widely praised. Sports Illustrated, a legend.
And look, things are changing. Cultural establishments evolve, fade away, become extinct. Not all magazines have to exist forever. But it’s disappointing when an otherwise popular, viable, and even beloved cultural establishment dies, while there’s a team working overtime at the helm. that needs to keep the lights on, because an adventurous Wall Street firm or licensing company can make margin profits by cutting its heart out.
The tragedy of AI is that it can upgrade smart journalists, but it accepts all the crude and callous measures that are taken through control to degrade content production. . . And it promises to speed it up.
If the bloodhounds are outraged by the rise of AI and its use in editorial operations and newsrooms, they won’t be because it’s a sign that they’re about to be replaced, but because control has so little respect for paintings made through the hounds that they’re willing to prioritize the automatic production of waste.
AI has yet to emerge from a media company’s innovation lab from a handshake deal with a shady third party. It is a Hail Mary technique that aspires to update the formulas of a genuine plan to transform a company: a map of the long term. Race your way out of prison with no fees for business leaders facing tough times. And it almost certainly will.
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Brian Merchant is the generation columnist for the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of “The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone” and the upcoming “Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech. “co-founder of Terraform, Vice Media’s speculative fiction website, and co-editor of the anthology “Terraform: Watch/Worlds/Burn. “Previously, he was an editor at Motherboard and his writings have been printed in The New York Times. , Harper’s Magazine, WIRED, the Atlantic, Fast Company, and Slate, among others.
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