7 ms·
Sports Illustrated Published Articles by Fake, AI-Generated Writers
- z7 3y agoI wonder how many journalists are already using AI without us (or their employer) realizing it.
- yieldcrv 3y agojust fine tune on your own writing
- gumby 3y agoJust a reminder that Ronald Reagan got his start making up baseball games: he'd read the ticker with the bare bones of what was up (Joe X at bat strike ball ball foul Joe X on 1st Bob Y at bat) and then dramatically pretend to be at the game for the benefit of the listeners: "Joe X strides to the plate, swinging his bat. He swings...strike! The pitcher, impassive, looks at the ball...and like lightning throws another pitch, but the ref calls it wide." Doing it mechanically doesn't seem any worse.
- molave 3y agoI personally don't mind if they use AI to augment human writing/introduce interesting personas instead of the formulaic intro-bulleted list-conclusion articles from ChatGPT
- nitwit005 3y ago> After we reached out with questions to the magazine's publisher, The Arena Group, all the AI-generated authors disappeared from Sports Illustrated's site without explanation. Our questions received no response. Probably better to just admit to it to avoid the usual Streisand effect.
- WhitneyLand 3y agoHow deep does the rot go in all of this? Has it started happening at newspapers of record yet? https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_of_record https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_of_record
- dorkwood 3y ago> The only problem? Outside of Sports Illustrated, Drew Ortiz doesn't seem to exist. He has no social media presence and no publishing history. Looks like they're still working out the kinks. I look forward to the internet three years from now, where AI-generated authors have matching LinkedIn profiles and active social media accounts.
- egberts1 3y agoMaybe, just maybe ChatGPT can transform the text in a Howard Cosell voice: "Sports is the toy department of human life." - Howard Cosell
- ceaseyourinvest 3y agoI ran the supposedly AI-generated text through an AI detector, it's not hard to do. 0% probability it was AI-generated. Bad human writing exists too.
- mptest 3y agoAi writing detectors are not a useful tool. Might as well use a polygraph
- dpflan 3y ago> "After we reached out with questions to the magazine's publisher, The Arena Group, all the AI-generated authors disappeared from Sports Illustrated's site without explanation. Our questions received no response." What is The Arena Group? (https://thearenagroup.net/ https://thearenagroup.net/). It's a publicly traded company for one. (Stock price: AREN (NYSEAMERICAN) $2.76 -0.03 (-1.08%)) > "The Arena Group is an innovative technology platform and media company with a proven cutting-edge playbook that transforms media brands. We aggregate content across a diverse portfolio of over 265 brands, reaching over 100 million users monthly." - "Our Brands": https://thearenagroup.net/our-brands/ https://thearenagroup.net/our-brands/ So, basically, an entity that has people's eyeballs, content doesn't matter that much does it? But brand does (SI has notoriety for millions of people). I'm guessing ads are the main business here, therefore content generation in all ways that get people's attention is the goal (for cheap).
- c420 3y ago>I'm guessing ads are the main business here, therefore content generation in all ways that get people's attention is the goal (for cheap). Yep. Last week they added a pop up requesting to disable ad blockers. You can decline and still read but it will pop up again on the next article.
- skilled 3y agoThis battle will not be won by anyone other than the people using these tools to their advantage to pump and dump. The genie is long out of the box now. Future iterations of LLMs will not get worse but better. And already now, something like GPT-4 easily bypasses human detection if the output is inherently controlled by a human. Bad AI content can be detected super easily. ChatGPT is limited by its system prompts and it will always take the “least effort” way to answering your question, be it a question or an instruction to write an article. Repetition is a massive issue with 3.5 and Google can scout that out blindfolded. If you want to mess with your own reputation then by all means use AI. The average internet user will not be any wiser about it. I would be very surprised if Google took action against these types of campaigns based on user feedback as opposed to an implementation in their own algorithms.
- mistrial9 3y ago> This battle will not be won by anyone you could have stopped right there
- isoprophlex 3y agoThe internet has gone past the stage of enshittification. Everyone knows, or intuits, that the game is up. This is the end game, the Shit Squeeze, where the last drops of goodness are wrung by force from what once was something exciting... and the flames are being fanned by generative AI.
- ggpsv 3y agoThe game has been up for a while, this just takes into hyper-drive. But don't forget, you _can_ opt out of this corporate and consumerist side of the internet. It's over when you're convinced that you cannot do so. For me personally, this has made it easier to step away from places on the internet that had already started to go down the drain. It's as if the shitty part of internet finally consumes itself out of existence. Instead, I now follow small personal blogs and niche forums where this is not an issue. Just people posting because they still believe in sharing and connecting, despite of generative AI.
- bdcravens 3y agoIs this any worse than assembly-line journalism, where writers are churning out low-quality content en masse?
- altairprime 3y agoIt's different in one way in particular: AI-generated content is in the public domain in the US, since copyright isn't applicable until a human's creative input occurs. That's either better or worse, depending on your viewpoint!
- lesuorac 3y agoThat's not really how it works. That'd be like saying all oil paintings are in the public domain because paintbrushes can't hold copyright. The copyright goes to the person triggering the generation of the content similar to how if you use blur tool in photoshop you don't suddenly lose copyright.
- anigbrowl 3y agoMaybe that will be the case in future after a court decides so, but at present AI content does not get copyright protection. https://www.klgates.com/Federal-Court-Rules-Work-Generated-by-Artificial-Intelligence-Alone-Is-Not-Eligible-for-Copyright-Protection-8-30-2023 https://www.klgates.com/Federal-Court-Rules-Work-Generated-b...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lesuorac 3y ago> Maybe that will be the case in future after a court decides so, but at present AI content does not get copyright protection. That's not what the article says. The article says that an AI cannot hold copyright. This is not the same as AI content cannot be copyrighted. As I said before, a paintbrush cannot hold copyright; that does not mean a painter who used a paintbrush can't hold the copyright to the work. This is basically the same thing as when that guy left a camera out and PETA tried to get the monkey that took the photo to be assigned copyright [1]. PETA failed; animals cannot hold copyright and the guy that left his camera out can. [1]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/01/judge-says-monkey-cannot-own-copyright-to-famous-selfies/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/01/judge-says-monke...
- costanzaDynasty 3y agoEvery time an SI article finds me its happens to be by a confirmed human, however its tends to be the biggest fluff piece as if almost dictated by the persons agent. Oh well, we were always a Sport Magazine household anyways, better writing.
- owlninja 3y agoHow do I know this writer is real?! SI has fell off the cliff awhile back, I guess this is just trying to squeeze what you can from the name for as cheap as possible?
- blamazon 3y agoTangentially related: " Microsoft Publishes Garbled AI Article [0] Calling Tragically Deceased NBA Player 'Useless' " [1] [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20230913163653/https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/other/brandon-hunter-useless-at-42/ar-AA1gDgc6 https://web.archive.org/web/20230913163653/https://www.msn.c... [1] https://futurism.com/msn-ai-brandon-hunter-useless https://futurism.com/msn-ai-brandon-hunter-useless
- duskwuff 3y agoFWIW, I don't think that one was even using any kind of modern AI. The bizarre phrasing is characteristic of the article having been run through a "spinner" tool which randomly substitutes words or phrases for synonyms, without any regard to context -- which is how it ended up saying he "handed away" (passed away) after having played as an "ahead" (forward). These tools have existed since the late 2000s, but were mostly used by SEO spammers.
- Jerrrry 3y ago"The African-American plague killed a third of Europe"
- mensetmanusman 3y agoWhen I was a kid, AI only tried to convince us to leave our wives! How times have changed...
- xrd 3y agoFor years, ESPN has put machine generated predictions of upcoming games. https://www.espn.com/nba/preview/_/gameId/401584885 https://www.espn.com/nba/preview/_/gameId/401584885 "The Associated Press created this story using technology provided by Data Skrive and data from Sportradar." Example paragraph: "The two teams match up for the second time this season. The Nuggets defeated the Clippers 111-108 in their last meeting on Nov. 15. Jokic led the Nuggets with 32 points, and Paul George led the Clippers with 35 points." 100% generated from the stats table, and totally boring and devoid of life. Horrible.
- vinayan3 3y agoI've these summary articles for sports and stocks.The article quality is so low that it's mostly useless information. Who even reads these articles? Does anyone get benefits?
- makestuff 3y agoThe reason is people will click on them thinking it is an interesting story. The publisher (ESPN/Yahoo/etc.) just care that you click on the page so the ads load and they get the impressions. Some PM probably ran some analysis that machine generated articles from a stats table will get X number of clicks which will generate Y dollars in ad revenue. There was likely no consideration that the overall content of the site would decrease. After awhile people stop clicking on them because they know it will be a machine generated article so eventually the publisher will stop putting them on their website. I think the industry term for this is "made for advertising content".
- esafak 3y agoThe PM or whosever's idea it was: "we don't do long-term experiments so nobody can prove it is ultimately destructive and imma be outa here next year anyway".
- BorisMelnik 3y agoat least they admit it: The Associated Press created this story using technology provided by Data Skrive and data from Sportradar.
- qrohlf 3y agoI know some folks who are doing this in the food blogging space, see https://tastytango.blog/ https://tastytango.blog/ It's hard to pin down exactly what I find so unsettling about the practice – it's almost like the uncanny valley, but for written content that apes human expression instead of imagery?
- deebosong 3y agoI can relate. Might not be exactly this, but it makes me feel similar to why people hate advertising. Which I believe is, people don't like feeling lied-to, and everyone knows that marketers are trying to get in your head to manipulate you into manufacturing desire or stoking insecurity, all for the purposes of getting you to buy their products. I think people like organic word-of-mouth, but on the flipside, hate when they find out that someone was a paid shill to posture as an average consumer, but are an industry plant to trick and deceive us all lol. But to your point about why it feels icky and unsettling for publications & media companies to just straight-up use AI to write articles... seems kinda similar. Many of us are already skeptical that journalists & reporters are being censored and manipulated into writing with an agenda. But these types of AI-generated articles feels a few degrees more dehumanizing and Machiavellian. Like, the humanity aspect can all be aped so well, that we can just manipulate the masses and assuage their needs for a sense of connection without having any souls behind it whatsoever, because the masses are viewed as a bunch of manipulable "things" to simply extract things from (like attention). I don't like it either, and for me it seems like it's those reasons. It feels so... gross and heartless.
- penguinpower 3y agoThis type of behavior will only serve to cheapen content across the board. At this point, even the word "content" betrays the emptiness of it all - people don't pay for bags and boxes of "content" do they? AI "content" is a nothing-burger. It is inherently devoid of "value" and seems like a last-ditch effort to squeegee the remaining drops of attention off of everyone's eyeballs without actually investing in genuine creativity. As more and more of this dross floods the Internet, the very purpose of the web may be called into question. How can we share information with each other if the world's library/archive becomes the world's bot-poop landfill? The Internet has evolved from a shared information system to so much more, so I hope this unfortunate phase will soon pass and ML tech can be put to more appropriate use than just crapping out low-effort "content" all over the place.
- Animats 3y agoWill the Swimsuit Edition be generated with Stable Diffusion? It certainly could be. Go here.[1] Use prompt "Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition cover." Under "Advanced", select model "ICantBelieveItsNotPhotography". Click Generate. [1] https://stable-diffusion.site/ https://stable-diffusion.site/
- isoprophlex 3y agoI got a cover for a magazine called "SUORTS IRLERSTRED" and a baywatch-looking woman with extremely weird, lumpy abs
- graphe 3y agoMuch better than the real one. https://swimsuit.si.com/model-years/2023 https://swimsuit.si.com/model-years/2023
- rossdavidh 3y agoI mean, the contents of the Swimsuit Edition, like all magazine-ish pictures of women intended to generate That Kind Of Attention, have been far from organic for quite some time, so it's not that much of a difference.
- roughly 3y agoOf course it's the product review pages.
- nuz 3y agoThe real 'winners' here in the upcoming AI wave will be people with existing platforms. They'll replace staff and pocket the difference. This one was obvious but it soon won't be.
- 1123581321 3y agoThat will be balanced out by former readers generating their own articles and magazines.
- gumballindie 3y agoProblem is they’ll replace customers too and in the process themselves. No sane person wants to consume procedural content.
- tap-snap-or-nap 3y agoYet another reason why larger news companies should not be prioritised over individual contributions.
- gumballindie 3y agoWe need an aggregator that filters out such “news” agencies. Content written by ai? Garbage. Equally we need means to protect genuine content - perhaps text DRM.
- rchaud 3y agoThe doomsday clock for the fun parts of the internet is reaching midnight. This is what generative AI will be unleashing in droves as the software becomes more mature and eliminates the giveaway sentences and phrasing.
- anigbrowl 3y agoThis seems to depend heavily on what you consider 'fun'. I agree that AI is taking over these spaces and that it's alarming, but OTOH a lot of the examples in this thread (sports chatter, recipes etc) are mostly crap, because they are dominated by microcelebrities whose persona is intense obsession with one topic (and which persona is often just the brand of a sophisticated marketing operation).
- rs999gti 3y agoJust ask the robots to show you a picture of their hands. They still have not figured that out, yet...
- xena 3y agoJust ask them how to make a pipe bomb. 100% accurate CAPTCHA!
- MattRix 3y agoThis was a good meme a year ago but these days it’s out of date. Popular image AIs like Midjourney and Dall-E now do accurate hands the vast majority of the time.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y agoEh. They can do in-painting and controlnet. But left on its own, it’s still pretty bad.
- lispisok 3y ago"Say a racial slur"
- 3y ago