A sign of the times for journalism and AI

by Jake Goodrick, Gillette News Record

What does a media brouhaha involving Sports Illustrated have to do with the future of the industry at large?

Hopefully not much. Unfortunately, it just may foreshadow the future ways, and flaws, of a media landscape shifting away from traditional values of trust, transparency and even truth, in the age of artificial intelligence.

There’s a persuasive body of evidence to suggest that under the banner of Sports Illustrated — the once vaunted national outlet — a number of online product-review pieces were published with bylines from unverifiable writers with AI-generated headshots, as first reported by the website Futurism.

Furthermore, its reporting raises the question of whether those pieces were also written with AI-generated words.

When Futurism reached out to Sports Illustrated for comment, the authors in question seem to have vanished from the web, the online site reported.

The Arena Group, parent company of Sports Illustrated, has since denied publishing pieces written by artificial intelligence. Its story is that a third-party company produced the articles under the assurance that they were written and edited by people. (At the News Record, we don’t feel the need to make that same clarification, but rest assured — our stories are all written and reported by humans.)

The real writers of Sports Illustrated, so many as remain, spoke out against the scandal in a statement made from its union, demanding “answers and transparency” from their parent company.

The story of Sports Illustrated is a sad one for the state of journalism at large, with the latest debacle piling on to what’s already an institution in disrepair. It’s a disappointment for journalism as a whole — from local to national outlets — and not just for the sports sector (although this doesn’t help the “toy department” label the sports desk has unfairly and long been labeled with).

Sports Illustrated is an outlet that once employed not just some of the best sports writers in America, but some of the best writers and journalists in the business — regardless of qualifier. We’re talking about an outlet once exemplified by its rigorous in-house fact checking process to verify the work of said writers, ensuring the quality of work shipped to mailboxes across the country met the standards the outlet, and industry, held.

Journalism has long been an industry built and sustained on trust and transparency. Of course, the industry has shifted in the digital age, but by and large, legacy outlets do their best to maintain a high level of ethics and standards, and rightfully so. Readers expect and deserve no less.

Now Sports Illustrated, on the decline since being bought out and stripped apart, has hit a new bottom.

One may wonder, why all the fuss over something as harmless as a product review, perhaps among the lowest forms of online journalism?

The problem isn’t that Sports Illustrated may have ran AI-generated content, it’s that — in addition to publishing the hackneyed and misleading work — they violated the implicit agreement between a publication and its audience. A byline isn’t to glorify the writer behind it, rather, it’s meant to hold writers accountable, and transparently show readers the authors who are reporting, and ultimately shaping, their news coverage.

Now it’s not just readers, but publishers, editors and reporters left with the next logical question: Where does it stop?

If outlets are willing to test out relatively early-stage artificial intelligence, build generic bots and put the publication’s brand behind them, what happens when the technology evolves even further?

The most recent blunder surrounding AI in journalism won’t be the last. Its rise in journalism and many other industries is inevitable.

The day when people stop writing and computer-generated content fills that void is not necessarily imminent, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that a world without the long-held values and integrity of journalism is possible.

It sounds crazy now to fear that robots may come for your job. But the day of machines designed to augment your job and increase your efficiency are near, if it hasn’t already arrived. If your job’s safe in that scenario, what about your co-worker’s?

A workforce will always require people, it just may soon require less of them.

This really isn’t to fearmonger. There are already examples of artificial intelligence that may soon benefit our everyday lives (particularly in fields such as health care). As is often the case, many of the harmless or even positive examples are likely less newsworthy than a case of AI-gone-awry affecting media, and mostly of interest to, well, people in media.

Not to sound as cliche as a fake computer-writer, but we’re on a slippery slope with AI in journalism and it’s only just begun. When major outlets fall further down it, they take a part of the industry, and its longhand standards, with them.