Sports Illustrated Sure Looks Like It’s Trading Human Journalists for AI

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.