There is freedom in not caring. There is a simplicity to it, a kind of joy. No matter what you do, no matter what the consequences are, you do not have to worry. You do not have to spend one minute thinking about a larger world outside yourself. You may be responsible for what happens next, but if it does not affect you, and you do not feel that responsibility, then the problems are entirely someone else’s, and you’ll sleep fine. Not your problem. You can simply float above it all, insulated from the harm you are causing.
That’s why Sports Illustrated is getting destroyed by venture capital.
Yesterday, Futurism reported that Sports Illustrated has been attributing articles to writers with fake names and AI-generated headshots for months, which is unequivocally and undeniably true. They also reported that the articles themselves were written by AI, which is…also true, but harder to prove. The Arena Group, the company that owns Sports Illustrated, denied that last charge by saying, essentially, they’re subcontracting those particular articles out, yes, but the company doing them pinky swears they’ve got real people writing them, so that’s definitely true.
Here’s the meat of the denial:
AdVon has assured us that all of the articles in question were written and edited by humans. According to AdVon, their writers, editors, and researchers create and curate content and follow a policy that involves using both counter-plagiarism and counter-AI software on all content. However, we have learned that AdVon had writers use a pen or pseudo name in certain articles to protect author privacy – actions we strongly condemn – and we are removing the content while our internal investigation continues and have since ended the partnership.
Now, perhaps they’re telling the truth, right? It’s possible that those articles are genuinely written by people, and that sure, the byline and headshot thing isn’t great, but there could be an explanation for that too. We’d really have to see one of these articles if we wanted to judge for ourselves, and since SI has taken down all of the old articles, well, too bad, right? Gonna be a they-said, a-different-they-said?
Oh no. Because that Futurism article linked to an archived version of one of the articles. And folks, it is absolutely an AI-written worthless piece of shit. Here are some of the highlights:
Wilson Soft Play Volleyball – Best Overall
1
Photo courtesy of Amazon
Key Features
Wilson-brand
Comes in a variety of colors
Cheap price
Surprisingly durable
Materials aren’t as premium
Let’s start this list with the cheapest volleyball available because, let’s be honest, if you’re interested in trying out a sport, you shouldn’t be spending too much money at the very beginning of your journey. If you’re dipping your feet into something new, the last thing you’d want is to overspend only to find out that you really don’t enjoy the sport, ending up wasting a lot of money. Of course, this can be difficult for expensive sports like golf, but with volleyball, it’s a lot cheaper to get into…And if you do end up not enjoying volleyball, the most you’ll be spending is $9, which isn’t too bad, all things considered.
The article is a guide to the best volleyballs to buy for someone who is new to volleyball. Are we clear on that? I mean, that entire concept is absurd, but that’s the premise. So, okay, we’ll go with that. I’ve watched a lot of action movies; I can suspend disbelief.
This volleyball is said to be the best one to buy. Why? Entirely because it’s cheap. This is what makes it Good. “Our best choice is the cheapest one because what if you don’t actually want to do this activity,” is basically the logic here, which sucks and is ridiculous, but also makes sense because AI doesn’t actually use logic to make these decisions. It just strings words together and hopes that the reader is fine with them.
But what I really want to focus on are the key features. What are the selling points of this volleyball compared to the others? Well, let’s dig in. First, you’ve got “Wilson-brand,” which is nothing. “Why would you buy this Wilson-brand volleyball? Because it’s made by Wilson!” A person would never do that, because a person would not even be able to consider that the top selling point. But the blurb has text about the Wilson brand! Is it excessively complimentary, filled with flowery language? No! “Wilson’s a pretty popular brand, and while it’s not exactly the most famous in the sport, it is well-known enough to be recognized by professional players.” That’s not a selling point! That’s just a bunch of words! Like a dumb fucking computer would write!
Second up, there’s “Comes in a variety of colors,” which is technically a selling point, I guess, but 3 of the other 6 volleyballs mentioned also come in other colors, and at no point in the blurb are the color options mentioned in any way. After that we have “Cheap price,” which is admittedly the entire reason to buy this volleyball, apparently. Then there’s “Surprisingly durable,” which does seem like a backhanded shot at the Wilson corporation, but is technically a compliment, so we’ll let it slide.
Finally, my personal favorite, we come to “Materials aren’t as premium.” The plain reading of this would seem to be that the materials in this volleyball suck, but that’s not a good thing at all! Maybe it’s saying that hey, you’re not paying for expensive materials, but it just said that. Two bullet points ago, we had “Cheap price,” which covers all the benefits of the price being cheap. Reminding people that, hey, the volleyball is cheap because Wilson uses shit materials is not a plus. And a computer is utterly incapable of understanding this, something that a person would grasp so intuitively that he wouldn’t even think about how intuitively he grasped it. And, just for funsies, “Materials aren’t as premium” does not actually have a meaning. I would say that it is missing the part of it that would bring meaning, but that’s wrong, because that part never existed, because the computer never wrote it.
This is obviously AI-written. It has to be AI-written. It is not possible for a human person to write these words. Sports Illustrated can deny that all it wants, or foist off responsibility to the content farm it says is providing this shit, but reading it once would immediately make anyone say, no, this is neither real nor publishable.
Just to run through a few more highlights quickly, the blurb for the next volleyball features a lot of deflation discussion: “While the ball is sold deflated (for obvious reasons), you’ll be playing with the ball in no time after you pump air into it.” Another one starts with the phrase, “Volleyballs aren’t as complicated as many people think.” Yet another one extols the waterproof nature of its volleyball: “Luckily, there are some beach volleyballs designed to handle constant water and moisture, such as this volleyball here.”
And after the reviews, the real coup de grace: “The popularity of volleyball as a sport cannot be overlooked. In fact, an estimated one billion people around the world are fans of volleyball.” One billion! One billion people!1
This is obviously not an isolated incident, either. In a review for basketball coaching boards, the pros for the top choice included “The GoSports Basketball Coaches Boards has a strong clip on one side” and “It includes an area for player names and game stats,” while the only con listed was, “Magnets won’t attach to the GoSports Basketball Coaches Board.”
Now, I don’t love breaking out the This Is Representative Of The Decline Of America card (Ron Howard, narrating: He loved nothing more than to break out that card), and yet here we are. Sports Illustrated used to be not just profitable, but important. At least, as important as reporting about sports could get. Like Jeff Pearlman said, “This isn't Sports Illustrated. It's some bullshit company picking off the last pieces of rotted fat from the carcass of something that was truly great”
There are still writers there, and some good ones, but this is what their magazine is, at its core. It is cheap click farming, making useless, worthless garbage that is so utterly replaceable that it is produced by computers that have never been taught how to sound like people. The point of working at a magazine is to write something that will be worth its readers’ time. The point of publishing a magazine should be to create something that will be worth its readers’ time. The point of reading a magazine is to find interesting articles that are worth your time. SI is not even paying lip service to any of this.
Even if these articles were written by the worst human writers in the world, their abysmal quality would still make them a black mark on Sports Illustrated. You cannot claim to have editorial standards and put absolute dogshit like this on your website. You cannot say, “Whoops, someone else did it, sowwy,” while you yourself are publishing it.
Writing should not be purely about pageviews. It should be about creating something worth creating. But instead, what we have is business people who buy a magazine without really caring about it, find a graph with a line that’s either going down or just not going up by as much as they would like it to go up, and then they cut costs and ignore the purpose of the magazine in order to make the slope of that line a little bit higher.
This would be a dereliction of duty, if anyone involved at the top felt there was any duty involved. It would be an abrogation of responsibility, if everyone didn’t gleefully disdaine the very concept of responsibility. For a lot of people, it’s an absolute shame, a disgrace, a miserable reminder of the sorry state of the modern world, a sign that there’s no point believing in anything, For a lot of people, it’s sad to see something fall apart when they’d cared about it so much.
But not for the people who own Sports Illustrated. They don’t care. Because by not caring, they have freedom to do whatever they want, including destroying their magazine to make an extra dollar.
Citation needed
Righteous, Maestro.
(I used to love reading SI - all 52 issues!)