Last month, Sports Illustrated found itself at the center of a firestorm after it was busted using fake computer-generated authors and (shitty) computer-generated content — without telling employees and readers. The scandal came shortly after Gannett (which likely owns whatever’s left of your hometown newspaper) was busted doing the exact same thing.
We’ve noted how most modern media executives see “AI” (language learning models) not as a way to improve productivity, boost product quality, or satisfy readership — but as a way to lazily cut corners and attack labor (organized or otherwise). As a result, they’re implementing these potentially useful technologies in the most half-assed, nontransparent, and problematic way possible.
Both Gannett and Sports Illustrated’s parent company, The Arena Group, responded to the scandals in the exact same way: by playing dumb and blaming everything on a the same third-party vendor: AdVon Commerce. But in SI’s case there does at least appear to be something vaguely resembling accountability, given several of the Arena Group executives involved in the fracas have been fired.
That includes both COO Andrew Kraft and President Rob Barrett, as well as CEO Ross Levinsohn.
The company that first claimed it the articles weren’t generated by AI (they were), and had no idea how this all happened is now claiming the firings have nothing to do with the recent scandal:
“Speaking to Futurism, [majority owner Manoj] Bhargava’s rep claimed the dismissals were unrelated to recent revelations about Arena Group’s use of AI or the resulting damage to the reputation of Sports Illustrated and Arena Group writ large — and that the cuts were made as part of Bhargava’s overall reorganization plan.”
This will be far from the last of these sort of scandals. The fail-upward, trust fund brunchlords in charge of most major media companies are dead set on replacing human-focused and generated journalism with an (badly) automated, ad-engagement ouroboros that effectively shits money — without any pesky annoyances like having to pay writers and editors a living wage.
But while early LLMs may be undercooked and prone to fabulism and plagiarism, the problem here generally isn’t the tech itself. The problem is human beings who don’t really understand the industry they’re in charge of (and don’t care to), don’t understand the tech they’re adopting, and don’t respect their existing writers and editors enough to include them in the decision-making process.
This is all set to a backdrop of a record-number of journalist layoffs in 2023, as hard reporting and journalism increasingly get replaced by a badly automated quest for clicks by some of the least competent and ethical people imaginable.
