"AI Will Never Replace Journalism," Says Magazine CEO Replacing Journalists With AI

Seriously?!

Pot/Kettle

The parent company of Sports Illustrated has announced that its magazines will begin using artificial intelligence to churn out garbage content in the absolute most oxymoronic fashion.

In a completely tone-deaf press release, the Arena Group — which owns properties like SI, Parade and Men's Journal — gleefully announced that it's embarking on "strategic development partnerships" with two little-known AI firms, Jasper and Nota.

"While AI will never replace journalism, reporting, or crafting and editing a story, rapidly improving AI technologies can create enterprise value for our brands and partners," Ross Levinsohn, the CEO and chairman of The Arena Group, said in the statement. "By leveraging these proprietary tools, we believe all those who create content on our platform will find opportunities to reach consumers in new ways."

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In spite of that promise, the Arena Group ends up showing its hand, writing that in a "pilot, editors used AI technology to rapidly identify trending topics and relevant proprietary archival content and photos to produce trending and evergreen articles."

Translation: an algorithm is going to tell both human and AI writers what to write.

Both of these apparent OpenAI competitors are, per the statement, going to help the publisher "streamline workflows," which is a business jargon excuse for buying automation software that is supposed to make less work but that, in practice, often ends up breaking spectacularly.

On a scale from CNET to BuzzFeed, this announcement seems to fall closer to the CNET end of the spectrum, with the Arena Group's empty promise that AI isn't there to take his employees' jobs followed by a description of how it will, in fact, replace human content.

More on the AI content wars: Red Ventures Knew Its AI Lied and Plagiarized, Deployed It at CNET Anyway