Several months ago, the Atlantic ran an essay about “Why Kids Aren’t Falling in Love With Reading.” As the subtitle for the piece notes, it’s not just about the omnipresence of screens. The onslaught of test culture in our schools have reduced reading to a set of quantifiable, discrete skills, and where students might have once read books, they are more likely nowadays to read isolated passages and pick them apart for those skills. As its author, Katherine Marsh, notes, “like with any magician’s trick, picking a story apart and learning how it’s done before you have experienced its wonder risks destroying the magic.”
When I was growing up, I read early and often, a habit that’s lasted pretty much my entire life. But I had cause recently to think back to my earliest days as a reader: while I definitely dipped into novels early, I’m fairly sure that some of my first “adult” reading happened because of Sports Illustrated. I grew up primarily with baseball and football, and most of my exposure to any other sports came through that weekly magazine. Some of the first books I read, even before my nerd turn to Tolkien, LeGuin, etc., were sports biographies, and SI was the gateway for that sort of writing, for me at least.
I was thinking about SI and how formative it was to my own life as a reader, mostly because of the news that came out last week. (The publication formerly known as) SI was embroiled in a controversy, as it was reported by Futurism that they were padding their site with AI-generated articles, “written” by fake, AI-generated humans, complete with AI-generated headshots and bios. Now, I say controversy, but really, it’s nothing of the sort. Sports Illustrated, like many other publications, has been reduced to a brand/logo whose only real purpose is squeezing whatever revenue is left to be had from those of us who remember the quality it used to stand for.
It’s been a while, but I’ve written about this before, the fact that private equity firms have laid newspapers, magazines, and much of our local news ecosystems to waste. This episode with Sports Illustrated feels less than controversial to me because it’s the logical extension of a pattern that’s been replicated across media for years now. And it’s not just “legacy” media, either. Futurism’s story recounts a host of badly written junk content issuing from all sorts of once-valuable online brands:
We caught CNET and Bankrate, both owned by Red Ventures, publishing barely-disclosed AI content that was filled with factual mistakes and even plagiarism; in the ensuing storm of criticism, CNET issued corrections to more than half its AI-generated articles. G/O Media also published AI-generated material on its portfolio of sites, resulting in embarrassing bungles at Gizmodo and The A.V. Club. We caught BuzzFeed publishing slapdash AI-generated travel guides. And USA Today and other Gannett newspapers were busted publishing hilariously garbled AI-generated sports roundups that one of the company's own sports journalists described as "embarrassing," saying they "shouldn't ever" have been published.
Meanwhile, in the face of the extensive evidence provided by Futurism, The Arena Group (which owns the SI logo) deleted all of the articles (and the phony authors’ bio pages), then released a weaselly denial which itself could have been AI-generated, signed with all of the bureaucratic confidence of a “Spokesperson for The Arena Group.”
Even if one were inclined to believe their denial, it hardly matters. David Roth, writing about this for Defector, puts it pretty plainly:
Whether a person or a program wrote the posts that ran under Drew Ortiz's byline does not matter, either, really; the quality of the product is the same, and perfectly reflects the disregard that The Arena Group has for both its readers and the people who have somehow continued to do world-class work at Sports Illustrated even as its owners strive to replace them with Drew Ortiz and "Sora Tanaka" and their opaque product reviews.
There was a while when the internet was dedicated to extending the reach of talented writers (and folks working in any number of different media) - the absence of traditional media gatekeeping and the relatively low costs of publication and distribution were an ideal fit for this. But the tipping point arrived when online media began to compete seriously with legacy media, eventually consigning it to the dustbin. And part of their strategy for doing so was by generating “content” at a scale unimaginable for newspapers, magazines, et al. And they generated that content by reducing “stories” to their lowest common denominators, slapping clickbait titles on them, and focusing on metrics that prioritized churning out traffic for the purposes of advertisers. That these groups would be using AI to generate content is only the latest step in a shift towards the kind of sludge that we’ve been putting up with for years now.
Once “the most trusted name in sports,” Sports Illustrated is now simply one more in a long line of empty brands being used to bait those of us who once associated it with quality sports coverage. AI-generated content may be the very bottom of the barrel, but the switch has been happening for a long time now.