“ The Inventory ” offers an unsettling vision of the future:

FOR JOURNALISTS WHO work — or used to work — at G/O Media, the disclaimer at the bottom of numerous articles on the company’s e-commerce site, The Inventory, offers an unsettling vision of the future: “This article was generated by an AI engine which may produce inaccurate information.”  

That warning appears on every article credited to “The Inventory Bot,” a highly productive virtual employee with its byline on 10 articles published on December 14th alone. 

• “It’s absolutely the most inane way to announce that your article is trash, like pure garbage,” says a former G/O writer who lost their job in a recent round of human-employee layoffs. 
• “There’s no thought process going on behind this except, ‘we want as many articles on our site as possible as quickly as possible. And we don’t give a shit about the content.'” 
• (A G/O spokesperson emphasizes that The Inventory “is an e-commerce site, separate and apart from our other editorial properties.”) 
• The former G/O writer doesn’t blame the advent of AI for his own layoff, but there have been some job losses at the company due to automation: The entire staff of Gizmodo en Español was replaced by a years-old translation tool in August, according to the spokesperson.

G/O Media at least labels its robo-content. A more venerable brand, Sports Illustrated, became the face of AI-journalism calamity in recent weeks after publishing what were reported to be AI-written articles attributed to nonexistent people, complete with AI-generated headshots. 

• (The articles came from a third-party company, Advon Commerce. SI’s parent company, Arena Group, says the vendor told them the articles were human-written, albeit with fake bylines and photos. 
• The outlet Futurism, which broke the news about the articles, quoted a newsroom source insisting at least some of the text was AI-generated, as well.) 
• Four Arena Group executives, including the CEO, Ross B. Levinsohn, were fired after the scandal, though an Arena Group spokesperson says the timing was coincidental and related to ownership changes. . .

Rolling Stone

Sports Illustrated, G/O Media and the Future of News Media and AI

“Journalism is going to change more in the next three or five years than it has in the last 30 years.”

david caswell, storyflow ltd. founder

“People generally overestimate what the system can do now and underestimate what it can do in 10 years,” says Infobot’s Harvey. 

“People probably overestimate what it can do now by 20% or something, and they underestimate what it’s gonna be able to do in the future by 10,000 percent. 

But probably most people can’t even begin to grapple with the concept of where this is going. ”