Sports Illustrated is ground zero in the coming AI revolution

The news of Sports Illustrated going under last month and laying off its entire staff should not have been surprising. Print media is in its death throes, after all.

The magazine, once emblematic of sports journalism and gracing every newsstand, grocery checkout aisle, and dentist’s waiting room in the country, had already been reduced to a shell of its former glorious self.

According to a statement on behalf of Manoj Bhargava, the firings “had absolutely nothing to do with the AI issue at all.”

The layoffs came a mere five months after billionaire Manoj Bhargava, the 5-Hour Energy drink founder, purchased SI in the first place.

But that isn’t all.

In the ballgame of corporate-owned media, the publishers of Sports Illustrated have a hot new prospect. Artificial intelligence-driven journalism is warming up in the bullpen, set to replace dead-armed human reporters who have been faltering on the pitcher’s mound for decades.

And the hits don’t stop comin’, and they won’t stop comin’.

Other publications recently have also announced massive newsroom layoffs, including the Los Angeles Times, National Geographic, Time, and more. A preponderance of staffers getting canned are also members of a newspaper union. These well-paying gigs include benefits, health care, expense accounts, and so on.

Personally, when these stories came out, I was prepared to do the typical “Go Woke, Go Broke” and “Learn to Code” trolling that everyone else in conservative media was content to roll with. Newsrooms nationwide have been racked with the “advocacy journalism” scourge by reporters, editors, and publishers who would rather push an agenda than stick to the facts.

But digging deeper, something odd caught my eye.

Sports Illustrated is ground zero, using AI to aid (or replace) human reporters. We shouldn’t be shocked when other publications follow suit.

How legacy media dies

Corporate consolidation has been the name of the game in mass media for a lifetime. Publications are bought out by other publications bought out by investment groups, then spun off to other corporate entities in a murky game of insider baseball.

Take Sports Illustrated. It was first published in 1954 and was a subsidiary of the Time-Life magazine organization, which eventually merged and became Time Warner. Once famous for its titillating swimsuit editions and weekly sports coverage, the publication had been reduced to a thin flyer, with barely any articles, coming out once a month. Sports Illustrated is not really even a magazine any more. It’s a brand name.

In 2018, SI and other Time Inc. media holdings were spun off and sold to the Meredith Corporation, which then sold SI to Authentic Brands Group for $110 million. ABG then leased the Sports Illustrated publishing rights to yet another media company called theMaven, which eventually changed its name to the Arena Group. In August 2023, Indian-born businessman and 5-Hour Energy drink magnate Manoj Bhargava bought controlling interest in the Arena Group.

Maybe enough human editors will be kept aboard to prompt a journalism chatbot to produce 400 words about Taylor Swift or some similar TikTok trending topic?

Bhargava in December fired Arena Group CEO Ross Levinsohn, a former vice president and interim CEO at Yahoo, along with several other executives amid an “AI scandal.” AI-generated news stories with fake authors and headshots were being used to fill editorial copy at Sports Illustrated. These stories were eventually taken down and a lame excuse given as to why they appeared in the first place. But the publishers had already bobbled the ball.

According to a statement on behalf of Bhargava, the firings “had absolutely nothing to do with the AI issue at all.”

None of this should have come as a surprise. On February 3, 2023, Arena Group and Levinsohn issued a gushing press release announcing a partnership with a pair of AI firms called Jasper and Nota to help editors use “AI technology to rapidly identify trending topics and relevant proprietary archival content and photos to produce trending and evergreen articles.”

The Wall Street Journal produced a similarly gushing article on the same day, touting how the Arena Group’s suite of publications was using chatbot technology from ChatGPT creator OpenAI to generate content as well.

What AI will replace

Moving forward to January 19, 100 of Sports Illustrated’s editorial staffers — mostly union employees — were fired after Bhargava could not come up with the $3.75 million quarterly payment to Authentic Brand Group for its licensing fee.

$3.75 million is chump change to billionaire Bhargava.

According to the Associated Press, both corporate entities are negotiating a license renewal. It seems, however, there will be a “significant reduction” in the workforce at Sports Illustrated and perhaps its sister publications, regardless of the outcome.

During a scandal about using AI-generated editorial content with fake sports reporters, it was highly convenient that the “mistake” of missing a quarterly licensing payment would result in most of Sports Illustrated’s staff being let go.

How will the editorial hole be filled?

How fortunate that Manoj Bhargava and the Arena Group, now facing an editorial hole in their flagship publication with a dearth of human reporters to fill it, have been pioneering artificial intelligence to produce content that already demonstrates “strong audience engagement.”

It doesn’t take a genius to predict that someday, very soon, a corporate-owned legacy media outlet will pull the trigger and unapologetically go full AI. The profit motive is already there, as well as the novelty.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, declared recently that AI is “much more likely to help us and save us even than they are to unbalance, hurt us, and destroy us.”

Maybe enough human editors will be kept aboard to prompt a journalism chatbot to produce 400 words of copy about Patrick Mahomes, Taylor Swift, or some similar TikTok trending topic?

Maybe. Maybe not. The writing is already on the wall.