A day after news broke that Sports Illustrated has been publishing AI-generated articles passed off as the work of writers who did not exist, the staff of the storied sports magazine gathered for a virtual all-hands meeting. Staffers were furious, according to people who attended who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal company business.
The website Futurism reported Monday that SI, the glossy magazine that for decades was the gold standard for sports journalism, had produced consumer product reviews by artificial intelligence and bylined the stories by fake writers. One writer’s profile photo was available for purchase on an AI website, Futurism reported.
SI withdrew the stories, but its parent company, the Arena Group, a media conglomerate that also owns Men’s Journal and Parade, disputed Futurism’s report. In a statement Monday, Arena said the articles were written by people for AdVon Commerce, a third-party company it had hired to produce e-commerce content. Only the authors’ names and bios were AI-generated, Arena said.
By then, the jokes had already started. Pat McAfee devoted a segment to the story on his ESPN show. “Sports Illustrated’s like: ‘We can’t hire anybody. We don’t have the money,’ ” he said. “ ‘But what if we get 10 more writers? Think with me. Who are they? AI writers!’ ” Reporters said some of their sources jokingly asked whether the reporters were, in fact, real people.
On Tuesday, during a meeting that was described as “contentious” and “tense” by two who attended, staffers asked for a full, transparent accounting of what happened. The meeting was hosted by Editor in Chief Steve Cannella, and top executive Ross Levinsohn joined 40 minutes after it started, the people said.
The answers to questions Tuesday about the AI debacle, multiple staffers said, were unsatisfying and incomplete. Executives said that it was a one-time mistake with an AI company and that they had already broken off their relationship with AdVon before the Futurism story was published. But staffers thought higher-ups were ducking accountability in blaming AdVon, just as Levinsohn had done in an email sent to staffers Monday evening.
“The articles in question were product reviews and were licensed content from an external third-party company,” Levinsohn wrote. “AdVon assured us that all of the articles in question were written and edited by humans.”
Levinsohn and AdVon did not respond to requests for comment Tuesday.
Questions about AI are roiling journalism — how it will be wielded, the ethics behind it and what human work it might ultimately replace. At SI, the focus of staffers’ outrage was less existential — product reviews aren’t sports journalism — and more about yet another embarrassment that they said undermined their journalism.
This, after all, is the same magazine at which a high school student was found to be covering the Cincinnati Bengals for SI’s network of affiliated sites, part of a strategy by the previous top executive at SI, James Heckman, to churn out content from cheaper writers — not to mention several rounds of layoffs and the SI-branded brain power pillsthat are trading on the magazine’s name.
That sort of brand-devaluation overshadows the good journalism the outlet still does, staffers believe, including a recent scoop about former Michigan football analyst Connor Stalions by Richard Johnson and Tom Verducci’s baseball coverage.
The root cause of the despair is a business model that staffers fear is irretrievably broken. The Arena Group pays $15 million per year for the rights to publish SI, in print and online, to a licensing company called Authentic Brands Group, which bought SI from its previous owner, magazine publisher Meredith. (More than 30 percent of the staff was laid off as part of that deal.)
Authentic Brands Group retained the commercial licensing rights to SI, which it uses for things such as the newly launched Sports Illustrated resorts. Arena Group, meanwhile, starts every year $15 million in the hole with its SI budget and must generate most of its revenue from subscriptions and advertising, according to people familiar with the deal. Even documentary, audio and scripted TV licensing rights are controlled by Authentic Brands Group.
That might explain the need for more content, however it’s generated.
Staffers also have chafed at new article production goals, though they vary by writer. Still, multiple staffers called them draconian and said they don’t properly distinguish between a daily story and a deeply reported investigation. (“It’s like judging a baseball player by how many times he swings,” one reporter said.)
Earlier this year, Levinsohn told staffers that the Arena Group owed tens of millions of dollars in a debt payment that was coming due, which staffers worried could threaten the magazine’s viability, two staffers said. That catastrophe was averted with a new investment from 5-Hour Energy founder Manoj Bhargava, according to those staffers.
This isn’t the first time a media company has run into trouble over allegedly AI-generated reviews from AdVon. In October, staffers at USA Today’s e-commerce site noticed reviews that appeared to be AI-generated and published under fake bylines appearing on their site.
Like Sports Illustrated, USA Today owner Gannett claimed the posts weren’t generated by AI. Instead, a spokeswoman insisted the fake names were pseudonyms for people who wrote the articles through a contract with AdVon.
AdVon is public about its use of AI. One of its social media pages said the company used “AI solutions for E Commerce,” while one of the human writers who produced articles for Gannett under USA Today listed his expertise as “polishing AI generative text” on his LinkedIn page.
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