Sports Illustrated backlash reignites discussion over AI-generated sports content
Popular sports media outlet Sports Illustrated recently had to fight allegations that the publication was using AI-generated articles and pictures as a means to generate content without having to pay human writers.
The article by Maggie Harrison of Futurism offers testimonies from people close to the publication who claim that the articles and images of the supposed authors are all procedurally generated or purchased from third-party sites. (Sports Illustrated has since released a statement calling the allegations untrue.)
Harrison points out that one SI "writer's" picture on the website was found for sale on a website that generates AI headshots.
Some of her interviews even purport that SI will rotate their AI writers to seem as though the company has turnover on their staff. What's more, when Futurism reached out to SI for questioning, the questionable author profiles all disappeared.
How are people reacting to the news about Sports Illustrated?
Sports Illustrated released a statement on the matter, claiming that the allegations made by Futurism are untrue. Rather than the articles being AI-generated, they were written and edited by humans through a third-party company, AdVon Commerce.
Sports Illustrated also claims that several of AdVon's writers use pseudo names in order to protect their privacy. Here is the full statement:
Several large sports figures were surprised and upset by the news.
Others expressed discontent but also noted that this was an inevitable junction with the progression of AI. So long as companies do not try to pass AI-generated content off as genuine written, edited content, they should be in the clear, but the potential to save so much money by not paying employees is often too much for companies to pass up.
The Sports Illustrated writers are obviously the most disgusted and most affected by this news. Not only were a few of them disgruntled enough to speak to Futurism, risking professional repercussions even while staying anonymous, but many also expressed their anger to other sources after the news had been announced.
Here is the official statement from the Sports Illustrated Union.
Is the AI content in question good?
Many of the AI-generated articles are littered with factual errors and unique choices of words that sound alien at times.
Futurism offers a few examples of this. One of the supposed artificial authors wrote an article about the best volleyballs to purchase. At one point, the "author" explained that volleyball "can be a little tricky to get into, especially without an actual ball to practice with." That's not something any professional writer would actually put in their article.
Another example would be CNET, a "source for information and entertainment tech, home, health, and wellness." In an article that has already been exposed as AI-generated detailing compound interest, wrote the following:
"To calculate compound interest, use the following formula:Initial balance (1+ interest rate / number of compounding periods) ^ number of compoundings per period x number of periods-CNET (Jan. 12, 2023 article titled "What is compound interest?"
This is obviously incorrect. Futurism explains that while the total value of the account would be $10,300 at the end of the first year, the person who put the money into the savings account would only earn $300 at the end of the first year.
These types of errors are small, but obvious to anyone paying attention.
It's also a question more organizations, and their readers, are bound to confront as the machines learn and the tools improve. Amid experiments with AI tools for journalists at Gannett, which owns Paste BN and more than 200 local news sites around the country, the company published local sports content in the fall that was AI-generated and editors stopped the experiment because it didn't meet our standards.
"In addition to adding hundreds of reporting jobs across the country, we are experimenting with automation and AI to build tools for our journalists and add content for our readers," a Gannett spokesperson explained to Axios in August regarding AI-generated content at the Columbus Dispatch.
"We are continually evaluating vendors as we refine processes to ensure all the news and information we provide meets the highest journalistic standards."
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