“The Baseball Vault: Great Writing
From the Pages of Sports Illustrated”
The publishing info:
Triumph Books
496 pages; $30
Released April 9, 2024
The links:
The publishers website
At Bookshop.org
At Powells.com
At Vromans.com
At TheLastBookStoreLA
At {pages: a bookstore}
At BarnesAndNoble.com
At Amazon.com
The review in 90 feet or less
Artificial Intelligence and Sports Illustrated got together for a discrete hook up recently, and the tabloids had a field day.
So did the moral arbiters at our non-profit member station Public Broadcasting Service team.
“Sports Illustrated is the latest media company to see its reputation damaged by being less than forthcoming — if not outright dishonest — about who or what is writing its stories at the dawn of the artificial intelligence age,” PBS reported on Nov. 29, 2023.
“The once-powerful publication said it was firing a company that produced articles for its website written under the byline of authors who apparently don’t exist. But it denied a published report that stories themselves were written by an artificial intelligence tool.”
The truth is, SI’s reputation has been damaged for several years, and this particular misstep had nothing to do with AI converging with Synthetic Intelligence. We were a bit sympathetic to what was really happening.
Since 2018, SI’s content has been leased by the Arena Group, and it was responsible for these third-party product review AI “stories” way down at the bottom of the website. The crime really is that it was ad material disguised as content. The stuff was summarily taken down and perhaps the brand’s reputation was harmed.
It’s not like they were channeling Frank Deford beyond the grave to rewrite some of his most popular Ted Williams pieces. That would be a grave misstep on so many levels.
This was really some superfluous stuff in question.
The humans still left at the Sports Illustrated Union was mortified, and it was a moment to suggest that there’s a chilling effect on all major news corps that had been dabbling in AI software as a way to make up for lost employees. Still, this much ruckus wasn’t really pushed out when The Associated Press started using techbots to assist in its articles about financial earnings reports since 2014, and had also been used to aggregate short sports game stories. Usually there was a tag at the end that explained how that story was produced with a data-driven technology and readers were not in the “Twilight Zone” of their existence.
The fall guy for all this was CEO Ross Levinsohn, and it’s just as well. Levinsohn, a former HBO exec who also worked at Fox Sports, Yahoo and then a crazy time as publisher of the Los Angeles Times despite its internal union outcry of his incompetency, had latched onto SI’s parent company, then known as Maven, Inc., which then sold off its soul to Authentic Brands Group and became part of a NIL scam to make people believe it was worthy of its name. Like, Chuck Taylor Converse. SI still had a magazine, cut back to once a month, and this suspect website with just a small portion of what used to be on the staff.
For those who remember, SI, which launched 70 years ago in August of 1954 as the first magazine to have more than one million subscribers, and in 1983 was the first full-color news weekly magazine highlighting fantastic photography — aside from its Swimsuit issue — has been though all sorts of self-inflicted wounding for a few decades.
Continue reading “Day 26 of 2024 baseball book reviews: When the artful SI had no artificial ingredients”
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