Rage Against the Machine

Yesterday afternoon Futurism posted an explosive exposé on Sports Illustrated, which has reportedly been publishing articles by fake, AI-generated writers. Maggie Harrison's piece says that upon reaching out to The Arena Group, the magazine's publisher, the articles in question were deleted. A strongly worded statement from the Sports Illustrated Union soon followed, and later on in the day a nameless spokesperson from Arena responded to the article, which dominated sports media conversations as a harbinger for a extraordinarily bleak future in the creative arts.

Even the most charitable reading of the situation screams that mistakes were made. At best, a third-party company had writers use a pen or pseudoname when churning out content that could be leveraged for those sweet clicks to SI. At worst, a person could see an extremely cynical and brazen middle-finger to actual humans on both the creation and consumption side that would both boggle the mind and seem par for the sad course media seems to be charting.

And while the actual facts are of paramount importance and we don't want to unfairly condemn, it's illuminating to use this as an oppotunity to check in on the state of the industry. That all of these would come across as frustratingly believable is an enormous problem. Writing original words for publication and getting paid for it is harder than it's ever been. Even those of us blessed to have jobs that afford us the opportunity have to deal with the crushing weight of financial expectation and return serve on any number of ideas management may have to streamline, increase efficiencies, and fundamentally change the relationship between outlet and reader.

AI-generated content is a prospect with glaring flaws but one hell of an agent. The idea that it will one day soon be this massive tool in publishing has gained steam to the point where it's probably the accepted norm. But those who are asked to implement it, or to have their own soul-driven work stand shoulder-to-shoulder with cold imitation prose are 100 percent justified for harboring concerns. There's a rich history of machine innovation doing far more harm than good to employees across myriad disciplines and perhaps it was foolhardy to think that low-concept blogging and higher-concept deep dives would be immune to the crushing tide.

Yes, there will always be roles for human beings to babysit AI and make sure they are cleaning up the mistakes. But it's also obvious that a few looks at the balance sheet are going to inspire those who control the purse strings to cut more people more aggressively. It's easy to feel compassion for real SI writers because this whole thing sucks.

But more interesting to me is how revealing these practices are about how little decision-makers think of their audience. Deep down there may be some sheepishness about the AI overlords gaining control and that's why outlets will go to significant lengths to obscure that the copy readers are reading was created by a copy of the human mind. Deep down they also might believe that they can shovel slop into undiscerning mouths and simply not care, as long as the financials make sense. When someone sees this happen at a place like Sports Illustrated, a legitimately beautiful creation responsible for sparking so much joy and creativity to follow in the footprints of its great writers, it stings like hell — even if the brand has been a bumpy ride in recent years.

It's sort of bewildering that we got here and even more maddening that stuff like this is going to happen more and more and could eventually become the norm. It feels as though not enough workers have enough agency or ability to affect change and too few consumers are speaking out with the simple message that the new world, well, it kind of sucks. None of which matters if the decision-makers care only about being read, not respected. Because why would they be interested in engaging in returning the favor?