Three years ago, Sports Illustrated journalists were concerned that the new owners and operators of the venerable magazine were drastically lowering their standards. They noticed plagiarism reports, and was concerned about poor writing and the use of independent journalists with little due diligence. Journalists also wanted better salaries, greater transparency during the hiring process, and a guarantee that all work posted on Sports Illustrated’s website would be edited.
It seems like things haven’t gotten better since then.
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said in a statement after the publication of the report. “We are sorry to be associated with something so disrespectful to our readers.”
The Arena Group, which publishes Sports Illustrated under a complicated management structure, blamed the situation on a vendor, AdVon Commerce. Sports Illustrated licenses product reviews from AdVon, and AdVon assured Arena Group that “all of the articles in question were written and edited by humans,” said Rachael Fink, a spokeswoman for Arena Group. He added that AdVon “made writers use a pen or pseudonym on certain articles to protect the author’s privacy.”
Arena has now ended its partnership with AdVon and is investigating AdVon’s assurances that no artificial intelligence was used to write the articles.
According to Arena, AdVon said it used “anti-plagiarism and anti-ai software.” But AdVon markets itself to potential customers as a company deeply involved in artificial intelligence. On LinkedIn, AdVon says develops machine learning and artificial intelligence for e-commerce. TO application page by Ben Faw, co-founder and CEO of AdVon, for the Harvard Alumni Association Board of Directors, similarly describes AdVon as using machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Faw did not respond to requests for comment.
For more than half a century, Sports Illustrated was the standard bearer of sports journalism. It was home to sportswriting titans like Frank Deford and Dan Jenkins, and photographers like Walter Iooss and Jim Drake. Appearing on the magazine cover or winning Sportsman (later Sportsman) of the Year was the mark of a star, from Muhammad Ali to Naomi Osaka. The magazine’s extremely profitable swimsuit issue came like a cultural thunderbolt year after year.
At its peak, Sports Illustrated had a print circulation of more than three million. However, the magazine has had difficulty adapting to the digital age. Monday’s revelation was just the latest sign of drift at Sports Illustrated, exacerbated by a relentless pursuit of engagement with the site’s non-journalistic entities.
“If you look at the history of the magazine, there have simply been a series of bad editorial decisions,” said Michael MacCambridge, journalist and author of 1997’s “The Franchise: A History of Sports Illustrated Magazine.”
In 2019, media conglomerate Meredith sold the Sports Illustrated intellectual property to Authentic Brands Group. It also sold a 10-year license to publish Sports Illustrated to TheMaven, which has since been renamed Arena Group. According to financial documents, Arena pays Authentic Brands $15 million annually for the right to operate Sports Illustrated.
Authentic Brands’ business model primarily involves buying down-on-their-luck or bankrupt fashion brands (Brooks Brothers, Aéropostale, Forever 21) and then shedding legacy commitments, cutting costs, and operating the brand while banking on brand recognition. your name.
The Sports Illustrated brand has joined nutritional supplementsand CEO of Authentic Brands once imagined Sports Illustrated brand medical clinics.
Since 2019, there have been repeated rounds of layoffs at Sports Illustrated and reductions in the print magazine’s circulation. Hundreds of sites dedicated to individual teams, run by non-staff writers paid small sums, were created with little oversight and diluted what it meant for “Sports Illustrated” to write anything.
Sports Illustrated’s problems began before Authentic Brands and Arena. Under its original owner, Time Inc., there were layoffs, including last remaining staff photographers in a publication celebrated for his sports photography, and was to be a weekly printed magazine to monthly.
But managing Authentic Brands and Arena has been particularly difficult. Because Authentic Brands retains the rights to the Sports Illustrated brand, Arena’s options for generating revenue are somewhat limited, encouraging a daily rotation of items. Employees have publicly complained that Arena has dismissed concerns about the quality of articles and a lack of editors (worsened in February when 17 staff members were laid off), while imposing weekly quotas on writers.
Last month, newspaper publisher Gannett found itself in a situation very similar to that of Sports Illustrated. Product reviews on a Gannett-owned site, Reviewed, looked suspiciously like articles not written by humans, and no one working for Reviewed recognized the alleged authors. A Gannett spokeswoman said the articles had been “created by outside freelancers hired by a partner marketing agency, not by ai.” That partner marketing agency was AdVon.
technology/2023/7/18/23798164/gizmodo-ai-g-o-bot-stories-jalopnik-av-club-peter-kafka-media-column” title=”” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>G/O Media, ai-generated-stories-policy-update” title=”” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>CNET and ai-newsroom-tool” title=”” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>The Shipment of Columbus Ohio has also experienced controversies related to the publication of articles written by computers without adequate human supervision. The Associated Press, whose policies are often adopted as standards across the news industry, recently published its ai” title=”” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>own artificial intelligence guidelines. They say that any results from ai tools should “be treated as unvetted source material” and that the AP would not use ai-generated images.
