For Sports Illustrated, the latest stumbling block is over fake authors

Three years ago, Sports Illustrated journalists worried that the venerable magazine’s new owners and operators would drastically lower standards. They noticed reports of plagiarism, and concerned about substandard writing and the use of freelance reporters with little due diligence. The journalists also wanted better pay, more transparency in the hiring process and a guarantee that all work published on Sports Illustrated’s website would be edited.

It appears that the situation has not improved since then.

The science and technology publication Futurism will be published on Monday reported that Sports Illustrated had published product reviews under false author names with false author bios. Futurism could find no evidence that the alleged authors were real, and the photos with the biographies could be found on websites that sell artificial intelligence-generated portrait photos. Futurism also raised the possibility that artificial intelligence had generated the words in the reviews.

“If true, these practices violate everything we believe in about journalism,” says the union that represents Sports Illustrated journalists said in a statement after the report was published. “We regret being associated with something that is so disrespectful to our readers.”

The Arena Group, which publishes Sports Illustrated under a complicated management structure, blamed a supplier, AdVon Commerce, for the situation. Sports Illustrated licenses product reviews from AdVon, and AdVon assured the Arena Group that “all articles in question were written and edited by humans,” said Rachael Fink, an Arena Group spokeswoman. She added that AdVon “allowed writers to use a pen or pseudo name in certain articles to protect the author’s privacy.”

Arena has now ended its partnership with AdVon and is investigating AdVon’s assurance that no artificial intelligence was used to write the articles.

According to Arena, AdVon said it used “both counter-plagiarism and counter-AI software.” But AdVon sells itself to potential customers as a company deeply involved in artificial intelligence. On LinkedIn, AdVon say it develops machine learning and artificial intelligence for e-commerce. a candidacy page by Ben Faw, co-founder and CEO of AdVon, to the Harvard Alumni Association Board of Directors, similarly describes AdVon’s use of machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Mr 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. Making the cover of the magazine or winning the Sportsperson (later Sportsman) of the Year award was the mark of a star, from Muhammad Ali to Naomi Osaka. The magazine’s highly profitable swimsuit issue came in like a cultural thunderclap year after year.

At its peak, Sports Illustrated had a print circulation of more than three million. However, the magazine has struggled to adapt 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’s just been a series of bad editorial decisions,” said Michael MacCambridge, a journalist and author of 1997’s “The Franchise: A History of Sports Illustrated Magazine.”

In 2019, media conglomerate Meredith sold Sports Illustrated’s intellectual property to Authentic Brands Group. It also sold a 10-year license to publish Sports Illustrated to TheMaven, which has since been renamed the Arena Group. According to financial documents, Arena pays Authentic Brands $15 million annually for the right to operate Sports Illustrated.

Authentic Brands’ business model consists mainly of buying fashion brands that are down on their luck or bankrupt (Brooks Brothers, Aéropostale, Forever 21) and then forgiving old liabilities, cutting costs and exploiting the brand while relying on brand recognition.

The Sports Illustrated brand is associated with it nutritional supplementsand the CEO of Authentic Brands ever envisioned Medical clinics under the Sports Illustrated brand.

Since 2019, there have been repeated layoffs at Sports Illustrated and the print magazine’s circulation has shrunk. Hundreds of sites devoted to individual teams — aided by non-staff writers paid small fees — were created with little oversight and diluted what it meant for “Sports Illustrated” to write anything.

Sports Illustrated’s problems started before Authentic Brands and Arena. Under the original owner, Time Inc., there were layoffs, including the last remaining staff photographers at a publication that became famous for its sports photography – and it went of a weekly print magazine to monthly.

But the stewardship of Authentic Brands and Arena has been particularly shaky. Because Authentic Brands retains the rights to the Sports Illustrated brand, Arena’s monetization options are somewhat limited, encouraging a daily churn of articles. Employees have publicly complained that Arena is dismissive of concerns about article quality and a lack of editors — exacerbated in February when 17 staffers were laid off — while enforcing weekly quotas of writers.

Last month, newspaper publisher Gannett found itself in a situation very similar to that of Sports Illustrated. Product reviews on a site Gannett owns, 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 “were created by third-party freelancers hired by a marketing agency partner, not by AI.” That marketing agency partner was AdVon.

G/O media, CNET And The Columbus Dispatch in Ohio have also faced controversy over publishing articles written by computers without adequate human supervision. The Associated Press, whose policies are often adopted as standards in the news industry, recently released their publication own guidelines for artificial intelligence. They say that all output from AI tools “should be treated as uncontrolled source material,” and that the AP would not use images generated by artificial intelligence.