Talk about ghost written...

Years ago, one of my clients was trying to come up with a lot of content for their website. And come up with it cheaply and quickly. 

They got what they paid for: a lot of half-arsed content that was in large part cut and paste from wikipedia articles, with an occasional word change so that the content could qualify - at least in their minds - as original.

The client ended up paying me to redo the content, which - of course - they should have hired me to do from the jump.

This was before the days of ChatGPT. But it was in the age when services were offering "writing" - or cutting and pasting - for cheap, often from folks from overseas who were willing to work for pennies an hour.  

I suspect that outsourced writing now would be better, and that if AI were the "writer," it could be instructed to create content that wasn't a direct grab from wikipedia. And that the content would likely past muster for several page layers down on the website, where it's purpose is to provide generic background information and to help with search engine optimization.

And I suspect that this is what Sports Illustrated had in mind - at least kinda sorta - when they used AI to create a bunch of lowdown articles. 

Sports Illustrated’s website, beneath the quality articles from its remaining magazine staff, is a content mill with little to no quality control. Freelancers paid very little churn out content on team-oriented sites, slap the Sports Illustrated name on the articles, and post them on various social media outlets to chase clicks. These sub-sites aren’t about journalism or quality, but hitting quotas. It’s a cynical play, but not an unfamiliar one.

In the case of the AI articles that were scrubbed, they were affiliate-link partnerships so deep on the site, most of Sports Illustrated’s actual editors did not know they even existed — and there was little to no oversight from those in charge of the content farms. (Source: Boston Globe)

But AdVon Commerce, the content mill SI used to come up with the bogus content, went beyond just providing the "written" word. 

Unlike my client, on whose website the content (other than their blog) is all anonymous, the content on SI was:

...an assortment of articles bylined by writers who didn’t exist — with accompanying headshots that originated on a website selling images generated by Artificial Intelligence.

Bylined articles? Fake writers? Bogus headshots?

Even if no one reads the articles, this is pretty scandalous behavior. 

AdVon, the outfit that produced the fake crap, claims on their website that "We Don’t Capture Value, We CREATE Value."

Well, value for themselves I guess.

But for Sports Illustrated readers? 

Way back in the way back, I was one of them. When I was a kid, my family subscribed to SI. Most of the folks in our house, from my father on down, liked sports. Plus we were all readers. So we got, along with Newsweek, Look, Readers Digest, Catholic Digest, The Ladies Home Journal, McCall's, Family Circle, Jack 'n Jill, Boys' Life, Calling All Girls, Seventeen, whatever the VFW and American Legion's rags were called, and as my sister Kath and I entered our sophisticated teen years, The New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly - Sporting News and Sports Illustrated.

Sporting News, as I recall, was a bit lower-brow, or was at least more focused on data and just-the-facts, ma'am news - while Sports Illustrated had the better sportswriters. 

SI, ironically enough, is owned by an outfit called Authentic Brands Group. Authentic? Hah! But, of course, Authentic isn't to blame. 

(...It licensed publishing rights to Arena Group, which outsourced some content to third-party company AdVon. Arena Group pinned the situation on AdVon, so it also outsources blame, apparently.)

AdVon, for their party, supposedly told Arena that "the posts were written by humans but that they had used a pseudonym to protect authors’ privacy." (There's precious little info on the AdVon Commerce website. I'm wondering whether the people shown on the team page - first names and pics, only; no click through to even a slim little bio - are real. But on their linked in page, they lead with the company providing ML (Machine Learning)/AI solutions for eCommerce. Hmmmm.)

It's easy to see that things on the AI-as-writer front are going to get a lot worse, at least for human writers who love to write, and readers who love to read material written by real writers. 

I don't think we're there yet, but will we know when it happens? Will we perceive a difference between human-written and AI-generated content? Will anybody care?

Hard to believe that AI - at least, here's hoping, in my lifetime - will be able to write poetry like Seamus Heaney or short stories like Alice Munro. But easy to believe that AI can generate a script for a Hallmark holiday movie, if it's not doing it already.

There's ghost-written, and then there's ghost-written. 

Shame on Sports Illustrated- or whoever owns or publishes or outsources or whatevers for them - that they would resort to this approach.

I was going to leave the last word to Chad Finn, an actual human Boston Globe sportswriter, who wrote the article cited here:

...it’s so sad to see the life wrung out of it by parasitic owners who value Sports Illustrated’s name as a brand while disregarding why it once meant so much to so many.

And then I saw this in Globe:

Much of the staff of Sports Illustrated, and possibly all remaining writers and editors, received layoff notices Friday, which essentially could spell the end of a publication that for decades was the gold standard of sports journalism.

R.I.P, S.I....