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Sports Illustrated Sure Looks Like It’s Trading Human Journalists for AI
from the beep-boop dept
Karl just wrote about CNET, a once-vaunted resource for tech journalism, absolutely stepping on every rake it could find by using AI-generated content that was absolutely laughable: the content tended to be inaccurate, plagiarized, or otherwise so full of mistakes that an army of editors had to rework the content, largely wiping away any cost savings the site was hoping to achieve. Good times all around.
Now, while it’s difficult to pin this down completely, it sure looks like Sports Illustrated is going down the same path. At the same time that Arena Group, the parent company for SI and Men’s Journal, announced that it was going to embrace AI-created content, SI is also laying off more wetware-based journalists.
“After seven and a half years of writing about the NHL, NBA, NFL, MLB, LPGA, World Cup, Olympics and more, I, too, have been laid off by Sports Illustrated this morning,” rejoined Alex Prewitt, a former senior writer.
According to an internal memo obtained by Awful Announcing, Arena Group has laid off a sizable 17 employees and created 12 openings to “reflect the new needs of the SI business.” (Something tells us those “new needs” might involve accommodating the generative AI the parent company has been brandishing at Men’s Journal.)
The state of American journalism is nothing more than an absolute travesty. The complete lack of value media companies and, to some extent the public, have placed in having real, professional, and human journalists is mindboggling. There is less local journalism now per capita than there has been for a long, long time. And now national journalism outfits are seeking to outsource journalism to SkyNET? C’mon.
And once again, the output of this AI journalism leaves much to be desired.
And on the accuracy front, Arena Group’s AI-guided dreck isn’t doing any better. Futurism, with the help of a medical expert, found that its very first AI article for Men’s Journal, titled “What All Men Should Know About Low Testosterone,” contained at least 18 factual errors, despite the authoritative tone of its synthesized prose. Not what you’d want out of something that’s supposed to be giving health advice to the site’s vast readership.
In response, the article was hastily and extensively rewritten to account for the inaccuracies. Some still slipped through the cracks.
That didn’t seem to bother Arena, though. A spokesperson from the group stated in a statement provided to Futurism that the company was “confident in the articles.”
Sure, express confidence in your error-riddled word-salads you call journalism. Why not? It’s only the reputation you have with readers, otherwise known as the entire reason you have a business, that we’re talking about here.
To be clear, SI has not yet used AI created content, as far as it has admitted publicly. But these layoffs create a vacuum that has to be filled by someone… or something. Given the route that Arena Group is going with its other properties, that AI is going to be employed here too is, at worst, an educated guess.
Filed Under: ai, journalism
Companies: arena group, sports illustrated
Comments on “Sports Illustrated Sure Looks Like It’s Trading Human Journalists for AI”
So in an article decrying the disrespect for journalism you make up a bunch of stuff about what might be happening? Doesn’t the irony burn?
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lolwut?
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Speculation about the likelihood of Sports Illustrated using AI-authored articles to replace human-authored articles isn’t “mak[ing] up a bunch of stuff about what might be happening”. That is especially true when the owners of SI have already published an AI-authored article in a different publication, expressed an interest in using AI to generate more articles, and—most importantly—fired actual human writers.
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Now now Stone, there is a valid point in their words (thought it’s not anything they were meaning to convey). If their demonstrated intellect were the average SI’s readers intelligence, the readers would never know the difference[1]. IF that were true, then the move to AI created contents (or I guess just pipe /dev/urandom through some sort of grammatically correct English sentence generator… unless that is their AI) would make tons of sense.
However I don’t think that comparison is true. If it were, those people would be too badly crippled to subscribe in the first place (and they can’t ALL have inherited riches, which means some of them have to have the mental chops to be gainfully employed… which isn’t a high bar, but we are talking really low standards here).
[1] In case this isn’t obvious, this is a subtle (as in hammer) insult.
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“make up a bunch of stuff about what might be happening? ”
Sir .. this is a Wendy’s.
Once again we see the owners of journalistic outfits have been 100% behind any decline in journalism.
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Did the BestNetTech Bot write this article???
Re: Oh, Please.
If an AI robot ever writes an article, the headline better be “BITE MY SHINY METAL ASS!!!!“
Why am I being reminded of the sales pitches about DRM by their respective vendors?
My dream for the future is to wake up, make lunch in a paper bag for work, hand the bag to my robot, tell it have a good day at the factory and give it a peck on metal cheek. Unfortunately it seems like it’s shaping up the opposite way, where roboto sends me home rather than me sending it to work.
'Not like we're giving health advice here or anything...'
At least eighteen factual errors in the very first article, requiring humans to step back in and fix it and the developer is ‘confident’ in the articles? If that is the standard they have for their health advice articles I shudder to think of how many people are going to be and/or have been duped into following terrible advice put out by them.
Next, they will be replacing sports stars with robots.
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There’s a market for that. Also in their swimsuit editions I suspect.
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oh lord. Talk about an uncanny valley…..
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There’s already rule 34 related content about the androids in the recently released game Atomic Heart, which definitely don’t look very realistically human.
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Haven’t we already replaced sports stars with marbles?
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Not yet, but Jelle’s Marble Runs sure is trying.
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Isn’t that already done in video games?
Man the clickotron sure has come a long way.
Brazil
It has been obvious for the last 12 months, if not two decades, if not five millennia, that the First Law* has been replaced with “In every case, war if preferred to peace”
During the eight years of the 1960’s US invasion of S.E. Asia, some print and TV questioned that war, but thousands of community weeklies had slugs praising the conflict for years and years.
Disclaimer: Terry Gilliam’s brother Scott graduated HS in my class, and owns the D.A.R.E. franchise.
Brazil screened in Westwood, Christmas of 1984 at 142 minutes, I sat there.
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Journos mad. You made your bed by being insufferable now lay in it by being replaced.
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Not even mad. Just surprised that people still treat AI like it’s going to replace everything. It didn’t replace Jeopardy players, Chess players, Go players, burger flippers, drive thru staff, or artists, so the chances of it replacing journalists is pretty much nil at least in the near future.
My job is very much safe and seeing articles like this where articles are being written with loads of errors pretty much adds to the body of evidence of such a conclusion.
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Shame it hasn’t destroyed News Corp, OAN, and all the right-wing propaganda mills.
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Do you want Skynet? Because tasking AI to write that sort of content is absolutely how you get a digital overlord deciding that humanity has got to go.
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I was being extremely sarcastic there.
And as much as there’s a joke line about welcoming our robot overlords, I have seen Tay and read about the new Bing AI (which I joke about it being Tay reactivated). So no, I would not want Skynet if it was trained on the News Corp disinfo stream and worse.
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Yet. When factual accuracy isn’t necessary for the content you produce, you can use anything to produce it. Let’s not forget they already use 4chan as a source of content and Rupert Murdoch is notorious for making brutal anti-worker moves. The smaller players of the right wing disinfo space like Infowars have already had issues with the growth of qAnon, with random on the internet like Stew Peters proving anyone can make money telling lies and eating into their audience.
AI driven disinfo networks are already here, they may not be mainstream yet, but they’ll get there.
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The problem, I find, isn’t so much that producing disinformation will be rendered absolutely trivial by AI. The problem is that there still exists a significant portion of the population that still gladly gives money to the likes of Alex Jones, and it won’t matter if the dreck they read was penned by Jones’s lawyers or ChatGPT.
About the only thing that will take out the likes of Alex Jones for good is for them to have their foot in their mouth so hard, it gives affected plaintiffs leverage to destroy them in court – the problem being that Jones is no stranger to shuffling his assets a la Norman Zada or Colette Pelissier to hide from the law.
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It would suite their style of journalism, as it would be easy to train it to tell the lies that the t repeat ad nauseum..
Having current level AI write articles about sports is like having me write articles about sports. I would have no idea what I was doing and would fake stories to get my work done. Think I’m being sensational? Just read my article “Bocce Ball Is Replacing Football” I wrote in 02-18-27.
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I was wondering which code of Football you were talking about, but since the date order is obviously MM-DD-YY, it’s clear you’re talking about American Football (and I don’t mean the band, which is signed to the sublime Polyvinyl Records label).
NFL game announcers could easily be replaced with text to speech equipment. I suggest bringing back Max Headroom.
All they do is read from teleprompter a bunch of stats and other minutia because no one cares about what is happening in the game, they are all arguing about their fantasy team winning it all.
This whole thing makes me think how stuck between a rock and a hard place we are regarding journalism.
See, one critical part of being a free country is freedom of the press, namely that the government should have no say in what gets published by journalists or anyone else (beyond the established exceptions to the 1A, of course). However, journalism is like education, law enforcement, prisons, emergency aid services (like fire fighters, ambulances, or emergency call systems like 911), public utilities, and scientific research where the financial incentives most directly pervert the industry, as they aren’t generally all that profitable in and of themselves compared to the work that goes into making a quality product (at least in today’s marketplace), working against the interests of the consumer far too often. Generally, those are the sorts of things that we expect the government to have some involvement in, whether through funding, regulating more heavily than most industries, or directly running the service, as the government isn’t expected to favor profit as much as private companies do, so the incentives are different. However, due to the nature of journalism, it’s also the one of the industries that should be left least tethered to the government’s whims to protect journalistic freedom and minimize state propaganda.
Now, until the internet became huge like it is today, this was offset by the fact that, in order to get ready access to the sorts of things that journalists inform us of, one would have to pay money for a physical copy of the newspaper or magazine, but now that is no longer the case. Moreover, now local outlets have to compete with literally every other local outlet in addition to national or global outlets like the NYT or WSJ or something that they used to. This makes it harder for them to make money than it used to without becoming far more heavily dependent on advertisers, which perverts the system further.
This is why many outlets have been using ways to earn money or save costs that are less ethical, like advertorials, AI-generated content, more annoying advertisements, etc. The incentives have become warped.
I don’t know what the solution is. Normally, when a market is absolutely critical to have (so we can’t really just let them all fail) and in a position where it will either fail or drastically compromise the service such product due to financial pressures or competitive forces, the solution would be government funding or something like that, but in this case, that option isn’t really much better, if at all, than the current system, as one major value of journalism comes from being independent from the government. It’s a huge problem with no apparent good solutions.
I’ve just come to the realization that these large language AI chatbots are “bullshit” machines, as in the essay “On Bullshit” by Harry Frankfurt. That is: they are unconcerned with the truth or falsity of what they “say”, but say whatever is required to achieve their immediate goal — to seem authoritative, and encourage continued engagement. Truly dystopian.
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So, GOP members are large language AI chatbots
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