When Arena Group, publisher of Sports Illustrated and many others, announced—less than a week ago—that the magazine would rely on artificial intelligence to help generate articles and story ideas, the magazine’s chief executive promised. that they plan to use generated energy just for good.
Then, in a big twist, an AI-generated paper published less than 24 hours later turned out to be full of errors.
Article in question, published on Arena Group’s Men’s Magazine under the questionable headline of “Men Fitness Editor,” purporting to tell readers “What All Men Should Know About Low Testosterone.” Its opening paragraph gasps to add that the article was “reviewed and verified” by a group of presumably human editors. But on Thursday, a real fact-checking of the work was provided by futurismRecently known science and technology store catch CNET with AI-generated pants just a few weeks ago.
The outlet revealed Bradley Anawalt, dean of the University of Washington Medical Center’s medical faculty, about the 700-word article, in which the brilliant doctor dug up at least 18 “inaccuracies and untruths.” The story contains “just close enough to scientific and documented evidence to be true,” Anawalt added, “but has many false and misleading notes.”
According to Jon Christian of Futurism, the store’s people management editor, that’s when they bring up errors — ranging from bots’ confusing medical technical terms to making broad generalizations and incorrect — for the Arena Group, someone had begun to quietly edit the content of the article. By the time things settled down, the new post was over a hundred words shorter than the original, according to a snapshot is stored.
It now also contains a rude editor’s note at the end, admitting some, but not all, errors.
Only then did an Arena spokesperson send Futurism a statement, which included in part, “These initial tests are underway. Building on these lessons and ongoing monitoring, we will continue to refine the use of these tools as part of our workflow, which has been and will always be embedded in the process. editorial monitor.”
In a message to The Daily Beast on Thursday afternoon, Christian said, “I can’t believe the people running Men’s Magazine saw the chaos at CNET and thought, ‘Let’s do the same thing.’ To me, there seems to be absolutely no shame in showing off.
“And to be clear,” he added, “some of these new AI technologies are pretty cool! We’ve only seen media moderators jump their guns very badly and put them to terrible shame in the process.”
One such communications director is the CEO of Arena Group, Ross Levinsohnwho preached to The Wall Street Journal last week that, while his media team is working on AI, it will be used as a tool and not a replacement for man-made journalism. “It’s not about ‘generating AI content and doing as much as you can’,” he said. “Google will penalize you for that and more is not better; better is better.”
One of Levinsohn’s previous gigs is notable for being the publisher of LA time under Tronc, the company now known as Tribune Publishing remained famous for gutting the editorial office. Although Arena Group has acquired Men’s Magazine only after its former owner fired the magazine the entire editorial board in 2020, as Futurism pointed out, its title currently has only five employees. It remains unclear which agency, if any, is responsible for monitoring testosterone coverage.
The Arena team did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Daily Beast.
