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Sports Illustrated’s publisher, The Arena Group, fired two top executives, Chief Operating Officer Andrew Kraft and President Rob Barrett, in the wake of the AI fiasco.
The layoffs were revealed through a representative of Arena Group’s majority owner Manoj Bhargava, the billionaire power tycoon who acquired a majority stake in the media company in August.
Arena Group CEO Ross Levinsohn will remain its CEO.
Speaking to Futurism, Bhargava’s representative claimed that the layoffs were similar to recent revelations about Arena Group’s use of AI or the resulting reputational damage to Sports Illustrated and Arena Group in general, and that the cuts were made as part of Bhargava’s overall reorganization. plan.
The C-suite revamp comes just over a week after a report from Futurism revealed that TheStreet, the money site owned by Sports Illustrated and Arena Group, had published affiliate-laden commercial articles under the direction of fake writers. Sources close to the creation of this fake content signed via Futurism told Futurism that the text itself was generated by AI and published without proper automation disclosures. For its part, The Arena Group claimed that the third-party content provider that created the posts, AdVon Commerce, used fake messages as mere “pseudonyms” for genuine people, and that no AI was used. Of course!
A failed artificial intelligence program that worried lying readers about the nature of the content they consume. Arena’s only problem Group. Su inventory has been plummeting for some time; The news about AI has caused another blow, but the company has not been in a good position for some time.
We reached out to Kraft and Barrett’s emails, but the messages were recovered. The two executives have since been removed from Arena Group’s Slack channels as well, according to screenshots observed via Futurism.
The news — to even casual observers — can’t be all that surprising. The revelations about AI left a bad taste in the mouths of media consumers near and far, to say nothing of the Arena Group’s own employees. And while Barghava might chalk it up to an overall restructuring effort: Hell of a time to start that work.
Disclosure: Futurism’s parent company, Recurrent Ventures, has in the past worked with AdVon in 2022 through their partnership to distribute a variety of content on third-party e-commerce platforms. This content was written through Recurrent contributors. Currently, Recurrent has a business with them to check Commerce content around the world for safe brands (of which Futurism is not one of them). AdVon’s content has never been published on Futurism or any of Recurrent’s websites.
Learn more about Sports Illustrated and its AI saga: Sports Illustrated articles via AI-generated fake writers