Thanks for reading Plugged In, Fast Company’s weekly dispatch from the world of tech. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to you—or you’re reading it on FastCompany.com—you can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Wednesday morning. I’m always eager to hear from you with feedback and ideas: Shoot me an email at hmccracken@fastcompany.com.
Let me begin as usual by calling a few Fast Company tech stories to your attention:
On November 27, news broke that Sports Illustrated had stomped on one of the biggest rakes in journalism. As reported by Futurism’s Maggie Harrison, the venerable sports media brand—now managed by a company called Arena Group—had been publishing articles written by imaginary people with AI-generated head shots. Furthermore, a source at SI told Futurism that at least some of the stories had been generated by AI.
After Futurism noticed the pieces, SI deleted them from its site, blaming the mess on a partner called AdVon Commerce and terminating the relationship. SI acknowledged that the credited authors were fictional but said that AdVon had denied that the articles were AI-generated. Not that Arena Group was steadfastly opposed to letting bots write for its sites: Earlier in the year, it issued a press release touting the use of AI by another one of its brands, Men’s Health. But that had blown up in the company’s face, too: Futurism pointed out serious factual errors in the first AI-written Men’s Health story.
Arena Group is just one of the alarming number of media companies that got irrationally exuberant........