Sports Illustrated publisher The Arena Group fired its CEO — just weeks after the publication triggered a firestorm for using artificial intelligence to produce poorly-written product reviews written by fake authors.
Ross Levinsohn, who served as The Arena Group’s chief since 2020, was terminated by the company’s board of directors on Monday, effective immediately, the publisher said in a press release.
Manoj Bhargava, the founder of the caffeine brand 5-Hour Energy and a majority investor in The Arena Group, will be joining the company as chairman interim CEO, announced The Arena Group, which also owns Men’s Journal and TheStreet.
Vince Bodiford, a representative for Bhargava, insisted to The Post that Levinsohn’s ousting had nothing to do with Sports Illustrated’s AI nightmare late last month, but rather part of a larger effort by The Arena Group’s board of directors “to improve the operational efficiency and the revenue of the company.”
“That included significant changes with the leadership team,” Bodiford added, noting that three other C-suite executives were fired last week — chief operating officer Andrew Kraft, media president Rob Barrett, and corporate counsel Julie Fenster.
Levinsohn addressed the executive shakeup in a LinkedIn post also shared Monday, which failed to touch on the company’s recent troubles and instead touted his time with The Arena Group as “an incredible ride.”
The timing of Levinsohn’s firing did, however, raise eyebrows, especially considering SI’s high-profile mishap late last month, when news site Futurism outed SI for posting AI-generated stories under bylines from made-up reporters whose photos could be found on a website used to buy AI-generated headshots.
After being contacted about the deceptive practice, the articles disappeared from SI’s site, the outlet reported.
A digital archive database, however, still shows that one story penned by a made-up man with the name Drew Ortiz ranked “the best full-size volleyballs.”
“Volleyball can be a little tricky to get into, especially without an actual ball to practice with,” read the article, which The Arena Group as since said were supplied by a third-party provider, AdVon Commerce.
Bodiford told The Post that The Arena Group is “taking steps to ensure that” SI has, in fact, scrubbed its landing pages of AI-generated content.
“We are very, very tuned into the importance of this issue,” Bhargava’s spokesman added.
Aside from hurting SI’s reputation, the AI debacle drew a lot of scrutiny from the outlet’s own staffers, who described Futurism’s report of the deceptive practices as “horrifying.”
“Along with basic principles of honesty, trust, journalistic ethics, etc. — I take seriously the weight of a Sports Illustrated byline. It meant something to me long before I ever dreamed of working here,” SI staff writer Emma Baccellieri, wrote on X in the wake of the news breaking. “This report was horrifying to read.”
“The practices described in the story published today do real damage to the credibility of the hardworking humans I have been honored to work with for the past 9 years,” Mitch Goldich, a fellow writer and editor at the magazine, also posted to X.
Bhargava, meanwhile, has already positioned himself as a sharp-elbowed, outspoken boss, making headlines earlier this month when he told Arena Group staffers at a town hall meeting: “No one is important. I am not important. … The amount of useless stuff you guys do is staggering.”
In a list of highlights from the 90-minute meeting, people in attendance told Front Office Sports that Bhargava ranted about recycling being “useless,” declared “PowerPoints are illegal” because such presentations are a waste of time and demanded that workers “stop doing dumb stuff.”
Credit: Source link
