A few days after it was revealed that the renowned US sports magazine Sports Illustrated had published several articles that allegedly came from AI text generators, the managing director of the parent company has now been fired. Arena Group’s board of directors has fired Ross Levinsohn with immediate effect, it is said in a press release. There is no mention of the scandal surrounding the articles and the company has assured several media outlets that there is no connection. Nevertheless, the temporal proximity is striking. In addition, three high-ranking managers, the operational managing director, the media president and the general counsel, were fired last week.
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At the end of November, the US magazine Futurism discovered that Sports Illustrated had published articles online whose authors only had AI-generated profiles. It was obvious that the associated articles did not come from people either; the magazine announced a review and deleted the texts. However, the Arena Group denied that they were also AI-generated. It was said that the texts were product reviews that were provided by a third company. The company called AdVon has assured that all texts come from people who, however, write under pseudonyms for data protection reasons.
It is not known what exactly led to the dismissal of high-ranking managers and the managing director. The company told the BBC that Levinsohn’s dismissal had “absolutely nothing to do with the AI matter.” Instead, it is a further step towards improving the company. There is currently no news regarding the internal review of the suspected AI texts. This year there have been several cases of media publishing generated texts without labeling this origin. Just a few days ago, the German Press Council issued a public reprimand against a publisher in the Burda Group that published a recipe magazine whose content was completely generated.
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2023-12-13 09:34:07
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