TSL #035: AI Is Shattering Corporate Sports Journalism
Read Time: 3 minutes
As a teenager, I was a voracious reader of Sports Illustrated. SI was the go-to for sports fans in the late 1970s and 1980s.
Their Big 3 writers, Gary Smith, Frank Deford, and George Plimpton, were grand masters of long-form sports writing and inspired me to become a Journalism major in college.
The Smith, Deford, Plimpton lineup was so talented that, for kicks, Plimpton published an article titled “The Curious Case Of Sidd Finch” in the April 1, 1985, issue about a young, unknown New York Mets prospect who could throw a baseball at 168 mph.
It detailed the mysterious lifestyle of the Finch, who played the French horn and looked like "Goofy in one of Walt Disney's cartoon classics" when he threw the ball.
Plimpton encoded the April Fools' joke in the subheading: "He's a pitcher, part yogi, and part recluse. Impressively liberated from our opulent lifestyle, Sidd's deciding about yoga—and his future in baseball."
The first letters of these words spell out "Happy April Fools' Day."
Despite this clue and the absurdity of the article, many people, including myself, believed Finch existed. SI printed a smaller piece in the following issue announcing Finch's retirement. Then, on April 15, they announced the great Sidd Finch was a hoax.
Oh, how SI has fallen. Consider this paragraph that appeared in a recent article from SI.
"Volleyball is one of the most popular sports in the world, and for good reason. It's fast-paced, has a high skill ceiling, and is generally an exciting sport to both play and watch. Even people who don't watch sports can easily understand the intensity and skill required to play volleyball whenever they watch clips. There's a reason why it's been such a mainstay in modern sports to this day."
Are you detecting a whiff of AI-generated content? That’s what SI is being accused of.
The Arena Group, the holding company that acquired Sports Illustrated in 2019, denies the allegations. The group said the articles were commercial content sourced from the third-party advertising company AdVon Commerce.
What would Smith, Deford, and Plimpton think of having their editorial turned over to an e-commerce company?
But the magazine is also facing criticism for its non-commercial articles allegedly written by AI. One article about volleyball, whose paragraph I included above, carried the byline "Drew Ortiz." But no Drew Ortiz exists – his biography and headshot were made up by AI. On X, SI threw the blame at AdVon's feet. But the market responded differently, as The Arena Group stock plunged 28% this week.
It should be said that using AI to provide "original" content is not a lack of integrity or morals from SI; it's about business economics. The use of AI is cost-efficient compared to human writers and a tempting solution to the financial troubles in the media industry.
Sports Illustrated, one of the most iconic IPs in sports journalism, was not the first to get its hand caught in the AI cookie jar, and it won't be the last.
AI is coming for sports media enterprises that once had the print and digital subscription revenue to support human writers. But the glory days of Smith, Deford, and Plimpton writing under a large media banner are over and will not return.
Like other sectors, AI is quickly breaking the corporate sports journalism industry into a million little pieces, and the reflective history of Sidd Finch is lost.
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For the record, I’ve always been a Jordan 1 fan.
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