Company At Center Of Sports Illustrated, Gannett ‘AI’ Content Scandals Continues To Fail Upward

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the mindless-infotainment-ouroboros dept

So you might recall that both Gannett and Sports Illustrated were caught recently creating fake, “AI” generated journalists to create fake, plagiarism-prone “journalism.” In both instances the kind of brunchlord executives that fail upward at these kind of companies thought it would be great to replace real human journalism with automated junk — without informing their actual human employees.

Many tech and media execs see “AI” (undercooked language learning models) not as a way to meaningfully improve journalism, but as a way to cut corners, undermine already underpaid labor, and basically create an automated and entirely mindless, low quality ad engagement ouroboros that effectively shits money.

At the heart of both scandals was a company by the name of AdVon Commerce, which specializes in exactly this sort of lazy automation. Human employees at companies like Sports Illustrated were fired by the barrelful by an incompetent extraction class. But AdVon Commerce appears to have faced “accountability” in the form of… a lucrative new cloud partnership with Google.

Google, which has come under increased fire for doing an increasingly shitty job maintaining quality control in both search and Google news results, apparently doesn’t much want to talk about the partnership:

“Additionally, Google declined to dispute the accuracy of the release. The search giant had been eager to talk to us when it announced the crackdown on AI content in March, but when we reached out multiple times asking if the partnership with AdVon was legit, we received nothing but silence.”

Now it’s not clear how meaningful this partnership actually is. AdVon’s press release says the deal involves AdVon’s “retail-focused AI tool,” AdVonAI, being more tightly woven into Google Cloud Marketplace, using automation to “help customers quickly deploy, manage, and grow the solution on Google Cloud.”

But it remains curious all the same that a company at the heart of two major journalism AI scandals appears to be seeing no meaningful reputational impact from it. Including from one of the top companies responsible for maintaining quality control of our collective shared online reality.

Moderating these massive systems at scale is no easy feat. But it’s confounded by the fact that companies like Google would much rather be spending time and resources on things that make them more money, instead of ensuring that existing programs and systems actually work as advertised. When you’re endlessly chasing impossible scale and growth, the financial incentives inherently de-prioritize quality.

Google’s failures here have been multi-fold. One, sloppy moderation of Google News and search only helps contribute to an increasingly lopsided signal to noise ratio as a dwindling number of under-funded actual journalists try to out-compete automated bullshit and well-funded propaganda mills across a broken infotainment and engagement economy.

404 Media, a promising new tech news venture built on the back of the Vice collapse, can’t even get its news stories indexed by Google. At the same time, they’ve been documenting in great detail the absolute flood of garbage polluting search and news and books results, redirecting revenues away from outlets and individuals doing quality research, reporting, and work.

Ed Zitron wisely put it this way in one of his recent newsletter posts:

“Generative AI also naturally aligns with the toxic incentives created by the largest platforms. Google’s algorithmic catering to the Search Engine Optimization industry naturally benefits those who can spin up large amounts of “relevant” content rather than content created by humans….because these platforms were built to reward scale and volume far more often than quality, AI naturally rewards those who can find the spammiest ways to manipulate the algorithm.”

As a telecom beat reporter I keep thinking back to AT&T’s incentive to turn the other cheek to scams, bullshit, and fraud that populated its networks and harmed its customers for decades. AT&T was paid whether the usage was criminals ripping off the hearing impaired or legitimate, everyday use, so it was never really incentivized to meaningfully engage in user protection and quality control.

In search, the impact has been a surge in AI obituary spam, automated SEO engagement garbage, propaganda, and assorted other gibberish. At the same time, U.S. academia, journalism, and even library infrastructure finds itself under relentless attack and defunding. Surely that won’t result in broad, obvious, and completely avoidable (but none-the-less hugely problematic) cultural outcomes, right?

There’s been a lot of Google executive turnover of late, especially in search. You’d like to think that at least some of these hires realize the scope of the information quality crisis we’re facing; and are capable of bucking at least some of the twisted financial incentives pointing them in all the wrong directions.

Filed Under: ai, automation, brunchlords, fake journalists, journalism, propaganda, quality control, search
Companies: advon commerce, google