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Sports Illustrated, a magazine I once waited for every week to be delivered to my mailbox as a child, is under fire for producing spammy, clickbait articles with fake authors who use AI-generated headshots.

The controversy says a lot about the decline of once-celebrated media brands and the challenges facing the ever-evolving "media business" – an apt description that stands in opposition to true journalism. 

Many platforms have been in the business of creating media, rather than just reporting the news, for some time now, even before artificial intelligence was programmed to create written content. In fact, some might say newspapers were always in the media creation business. For example, the newspapers of legendary American media men William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer (he of the prize) fabricated and exaggerated news of Spanish crimes to push the U.S. to war against Spain in 1898.

The news and media business has evolved and changed as technology and publication mediums have changed. Importantly, the internet changed the way consumers access content. Social media websites like Facebook and X (formerly known as Twitter) and search engines like Google push a lot of traffic to news websites. The internet also creates the expectation among consumers that news should be provided for free. These two changes caused a situation where news publishers began chasing ad revenue from page views.

The sad story of Sports Illustrated is illustrative of the decline of many formerly venerated journalism institutions. In 2018, with its subscribership dwindling, SI was sold to the Meredith Corporation, a conglomerate that owns about 30 magazines and a couple of dozen local television stations. It was then licensed and resold to a company called Maven, which changed its name to the Arena Group. It fired over 300 writers over the course of the process, and now it produces a lot of clickbait online-only articles attuned to search engine optimization trends. 

Sports Illustrated is a valuable brand name that long ago ceased to be a purveyor of quality journalism. That's why the allegation that SI published AI-created content is so concerning to many. It's the same story that's been affecting the whole industry and has now reached a once venerable name. The fear is that every writer and every publication is at risk.

However, that fear is somewhat overblown. AI programs cannot produce interesting content. They can only produce bland, unoriginal content that doesn't keep readers for long. Sports Illustrated's parent company denies that the articles in question were written by AI, but that's just the problem: A lot of the media business is already built around having human authors create bland and uninteresting content for online readers.

The articles in question were just "product reviews." A third-party content company was paid to create the articles, and Sports Illustrated would have been paid by the producers of the products that were "reviewed." The writers, even if they were real people, would not have actually tried the products. Those articles were advertorials from start to finish. 

Another genre of article you see a lot of in online media is the news click-chasing article. That is where a website anticipates a question readers are asking about a person or topic in the news and publishes articles about it in an attempt to land on the first page of Google. A famous example is the question, "When does the Super Bowl start?" The Huffington Post published variations of that article for multiple years in the 2010s.

There are fewer traditional magazines and newspapers willing to pay for straight news. There are news models like self-publishing, subscription newsletters, and podcasts. Journalists must carefully consider their skill sets in order to survive. They must develop a unique expertise and a well-liked style. Most of all, they must be able to adapt.

Mitchell Blatt is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit:

http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/MitchellBlatt.htm

Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.

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