Another major publisher uses AI to generate stories in the name of efficiency.
Arena Group Holdings, a media company whose brands include Sports illustrated, The street, ProcessionAnd Men Journal, says it’s a collaboration with AI language startups Jasper and Nota to broaden and increase the speed of “its AI-assisted endeavors”. These include training AI language models on the company’s archives to generate stories that are then edited by humans.
This article is a collection of expert advice from Fitness for men, using deep learning tools for retrieval combined with OpenAI’s large language model for different stages of the workflow. This article has been reviewed and fact-checked by our editorial team.
The language of the disclaimer is intended to be reassuring – “curation”, “expert advice”, “reviewed and fact-checked” – but this approach to hybrid authorship is far from foolproof. That was announced earlier this month CNET has quietly published AI-generated articles after being pushed into money-saving schemes by new owner Red Ventures. However, when reviewing these articles following criticism of lack of proper disclosure, Red Ventures found that more than half contained errors and required correction. This is due to the tendency of AI language tools to generate plausible-looking but incorrect information. (As computer science professor Arvind Narayanan put it: “ChatGPT is a nonsense generator.”)
Arena Group claims it does not want to replace journalists with the increased use of AI, but rather to create “enterprise value for our brands and partners” (to quote CEO Ross Levinsohn). In a press release announcing the news, the company claims that using AI has “increased workflow efficiency by more than 10 times faster than normal.”
The announcement follows last week’s news Buzz feed will use AI to help generate and personalize more content, such as quizzes, in 2023. The company’s stock soared in response, but has since lost some of that gain. Shares of Arena Group Holdings also rose after the company announced its AI news (from $8.82 yesterday to $9.14 at time of writing), though this figure is still just below the company’s share price at the end of January .
“Will [working with AI] allow us to do more content? Probably because you have more time then,” says Levinsohn of Arena Group told The Wall Street Journal. But, he added, “It’s not about ‘turning off AI content and doing as much as you can’. Google will penalize you for that and more is not better; better is better.”
