Sportswriting, I once heard it said, is like mixing concrete. The product is meant to feel viscous, then rigid; it’s smooth and firm when done well, and it’s blocky and grey whether it’s done well or not. (The likes of George Plimpton and Shirley Povich instead dug their pens in like hydraulic asphalt drills.) At any rate, the process doesn’t seem particularly fun, so why not let the machine do the job? I don’t suggest that this was Sports Illustrated’s reasoning exactly, but it would explain why it reportedly licensed AI-generated content by AI-generated authors by a third-party company that deals in “publisher solutions.”
Scandal, stupor, and shock. The Sports Illustrated Union is horrified by the shadow of artificial — or perhaps any — intelligence on its turf (software recognizes no picket lines). The magazine’s parent corporation claims that some of its contractor’s writers used pseudonyms for privacy — has the ranking of the best full-size volleyballs on the market become an especially hazardous affair? — which had to be accompanied by AI-produced headshots and biographies. (The intrepid colleague who wrote the volleyball listicle, known as “Drew Ortiz” presumably to throw Big Ball off his scent, “grew up in a farmhouse, surrounded by woods, fields, and a creek” before his bucolic existence was Shift-End-Deleted.)
If AI instead of SI is doing the sorry work of creating personas that can be credited with writing, say, product reviews or commenting on fantasy football — this department Sports Illustrated has for the time being manned organically — it shouldn’t stop there. Simply have AI review products and write about fantasy football. If what it needs is to fill the pixels between the ads with uniform paragraphs, not using a large language model would be not only unethical; it would be bad business. Writing might require voice and verve. Copy doesn’t. The website should be honest with its readers and employees about which of the two it retails.
SI’s owner has decided to pretend for now that it’s the first, so out went its chief executive, Ross Levinsohn (who had chiefly executed for the Los Angeles Times for a few confused months in 2017). In came Manoj Bhargava, alchemist of 5-Hour Energy. The new CEO’s spokesman said that Levinsohn’s firing “had absolutely nothing to do with the AI issue,” which should make you think that Levinsohn’s firing had something to do with the AI issue.
In seriousness: Rather than seek “publisher solutions,” the organization should reinvest in the human voice. Sportswriting at its best is a sub-genre of ethnography or character study. When Martin Amis, for instance, writes about the racket or that other beautiful English game, he says just as much about lad culture, or aging, or the curse of the feebly named (Henman, he wrote of the decorated British athlete in 1997, “is the first human being called Tim to achieve anything at all. . . . The name lacks all gravity”; even in Amis’s own gentle trade, “consider the essential unlikelihood of Tim Sawyer, Uncle Tim’s Cabin . . .).
SI’s journalists should be aspiring to succeed Amis, as well as Jim Murray (“Lots of fighters practice hooks to the head but Gene Fullmer used to practice hooks with the head”) and Red Smith (“Branch Rickey is a God-fearing, checker-playing, horse-trading, cigar-smoking, double-talking, nonalcoholic, sharp-shooting blend of eloquence and unction and sincerity and enterprise and imagination and energy and independence and profundity and guile”) and Tex Maule (the heavyweight bout between Muhammad Ali and Ernie Terrell was a “wonderful demonstration of boxing skill and a barbarous display of cruelty”). They are the heirs of a uniquely American sportswriting tradition. The first journalistic standard should be journalism.