Sports Illustrated boss fired – but it's totally nothing to do with AI fake news The Arena Group, publisher of Sports Illustrated, fired CEO Ross Levinsohn on Monday, characterizing the decision as a strategic business move that has nothing to do with the AI scandal that rocked the sports title recently. The Arena Group described the executive firings as an effort "to improve the operational efficiency and …
Of course machine-generated sports reporting has been around for several years, just as with financial reporting and other sorts of specialized writing. The use of LLMs to do this sort of thing is merely evolutionary.
I've never read Sports Illustrated (or bothered with the legendary Swimsuit Issue, which has to be the most overrated, feeble excuse for titillation in modern publishing), so I have no idea of the quality of their work. (And I don't know enough about the subject to judge it on those grounds anyway.) But — and I freely admit this could be unfair prejudice — my impression is their audience is not the most discerning.
Good to know all publications made by Arena group are essentially one step up from those terrible AI-generated content farms (but won't be for long, as content farms improve and this company gets worse).
The only way publication companies are going to survive is one of two ways:
1. Provide very high quality content, which is accurate and provides interesting insight from experts, and hope people are willing to pay the premium
2. Hyper-optimizing the company structure and efficiently pumping out top-tier AI garbage (not compatible with overpaid manglement)
They are opting for 2, because they are ovbiously not competent enough to provide 1. They just don't realize there's companies that are way better at this than they could ever be due to their ancient company structure. Sure, they have the benefit of brand recognition, but once the boomer's numbers dwindle they won't have any value left.
Are the articles anything more than a thinly veiled excuse to buy a magazine of nearly naked ladies anyway? How do they still exist? Have their reader(or wanker)-ship never heard of that recent invention called "the internet"?
"relying on independent contractors to reduce labor costs" --> Relying on extorting and exploiting "contractors" to reduce labor cost < TFIFY
Neither was the fact that many of the AI generated SI articles had basic facts wrong in their stories.
The solution, of course, isn't to fix the AI or use real humans and fact check everything. The solution will be to make the use of the words "wrong" and "fake" socially unacceptable.
"Fake" sports reporting also has a long history.
As a young man, Ronald Reagan had a job for a time as a radio baseball reporter. He did the equivalent of play-by-play and color reporting, both reciting the events of the game and filling the audience in on peripheral details: the players' appearance, the crowd's reaction, and so on.
Of course Reagan was not physically present at these games. He was in a small room, reading a ticker tape with the bare facts of what was happening — who was at bat, what happened with each pitch and play, and so on. He invented the rest of it from whole cloth, in real time. Essentially he was telling a story about a baseball game, where the material facts of the story that affected the progress and outcome matched a real game.
For a human, this is a fairly impressive skill. For an LLM the "making stuff up" part is easy; it's just stringing together clichés. The challenge for automating it is eliminating material hallucinations so the audience doesn't catch you out.
Same thing with wireless cricket* broadcasting. The broadcaster would replicate the sound of ball hitting the willow by tapping something in the broadcast booth. Given the (lack of) pace of the game the broadcasters could wax lyrical and at great length. The introduction of television somewhat cramped that style but long descriptions of the seagulls filled in any gaps in the action.
*cricket - a sport largely restricted to the former British empire distinguishable from baseball by its incomprehensible rules, lack of pace (takes up to 5 days to possibly get a result), and formerly played by gentlemen.
"The bowler's Holding; the batsman's Willey"
Brian Johnston never said those words, he very much would have had a good chuckle if he ever did - would AI have come up with such a phirase?
