Sports Illustrated was first published in August 1954. It eventually became America’s iconic sports magazine with three million subscribers. But the magazine has fallen on hard times and recently came under fire for publishing articles using artificial intelligence. LA Times tech columnist Brian Merchant wrote about the demise Sports Illustrated and joined Lisa McRee on “LA Times Today” with more. 

Merchant explained that Sports Illustrated was the “standard bearer” for sports journalism in its heyday, from weekly reporting to its popular swimsuit edition. But, with the shift to online media, the Sports Illustrated dominance began to fade. 

“As the internet rose and started to capture audience online, print-based magazines and publications really started to suffer. And Sports Illustrated was no different. Sports Illustrated was even a little unique among sort of magazines in that it really was print-forward for longer than maybe some other magazines. So it was even more vulnerable to this decline as ad dollars left as revenue moved over to digital. Sports Illustrated moved from a weekly publication to a biweekly to now a monthly edition,” Merchant said.

Last fall, readers began to notice that the content in Sports Illustrated articles was not stacking up with the magazine’s previous quality. Stories were being written by artificial intelligence. 

“All of these articles start popping up under the Sports Illustrated banner that are really poorly written… It’s some of the worst writing you can imagine. It turns out that it’s written by writers that don’t exist because they’re artificially generated and the articles themselves are almost certainly artificially generated. And [the publisher] says [they] contracted out the production of these articles to another company called Advan, and they are a company that’s in the business of producing AI-generated articles,” Merchant said. 

Merchant talked about the importance of media literacy as artificial intelligence becomes even more widely used in the years to come.

“Stay frosty out there because there’s going to be more of this. There’s going to be more AI content farms and disinformation. So media literacy is going to be really important and, you know, support the publications that you care about that are employing humans with your dollars,” he said. 

Click the arrow above to watch the full interview.

Watch "LA Times Today" at 7 and 10 p.m. Monday through Friday on Spectrum News 1 and the Spectrum News app.