Stacker Sports- Day 51 \ stacker news ~Stacker

It had been many years since I paid attention to any content that Sports Illustrated produced, but I have been following their saga around Athletic Brand's revoking their license to publish and the reported potential job losses for their entire staff.

I don't wish job losses on anyone or failure of any business but the quality of the SI product eroded greatly many years ago. As far as I can tell, it has been clickbait for a long time now. However, it was once an iconic brand. There was a time when the release of the new Sports Illustrated issue and discovery of who was on the cover was a big thing.

Curious about their current content, I recently clicked a link that came across my Apple news feed "Suns' Kevin Durant shocked after hearing about Joel Embiid's Big Night" or something to that effect was the headline. The story of course first had a video ad popup and then was littered with other ads right in the middle of the story and of course about 20 more of those standard junk "around the web" links at the end of the story (does anyone actually click those). As is standard these days it also had an embedded video from social media (twitter) as the focal point in the story. Usually, I can't stand that but I guess it made sense in this case because the entire story was based on Durant's reaction. To me the story seemed AI generated, AI assisted or possibly human generated in an assembly line fashion. Definitely seemed like content crafted simply to get you to click as another notch in their belt to show advertisers.

This had me thinking about the future of content creation, not just sports related, and how much of what we eventually will read will be AI generated. And I think there is a place for that. I don't mind the idea of and AI giving me just the facts and breaking news, but I think there will also be a place for individual creators to carve a niche and differentiate themselves from the flood of AI content people will be swimming in.

I think the value for value model will help to preserve some integrity in content creation and may be a welcome divergence from the ad littered AI content people will be inundated with. It does however remain to be seen if that differentiation and quality will be enough to economically sustain creators. We are in the early innings of the great content divergence.

RIP Sports Illustrated. Long live Stacker News (and sports).

Sats for all, GR

100 sats \ 2 replies \ @Undisciplined 25 Jan

Sports Illustrated has had pretty solid Raiders coverage lately and, perhaps not coincidentally, none of those writers are losing their jobs.

I agree about the role of AI in creating sports content. I'm sure most of the game recaps can easily be handled by feeding box scores and play-by-play into a program.

497 sats \ 1 reply \ @grayruby OP 25 Jan freebie

Colin Cowherd called the 49ers without Deebo, The Raiders. These click bait pundits are something else. Piss off two fan bases in one sentence. Let an AI try to replace that.

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 25 Jan

Fair point. There's a huge market for charismatically delivered stupidity and for now humans have that market cornered.

50 sats \ 0 replies \ @kurszusz 25 Jan

Yes, I totally agree with you. SI in the past years had attached to the sport just just in their name unfortunately... Today, most of magazines (sport, modes, cars, etc) in online are created, developed and directed by AI... Next years will be crucial from point of view of AI vs "classical" journalism

50 sats \ 1 reply \ @BlokchainB 26 Jan

End of an era. Was too broke as a child to get the magazines. Found it odd the put a transexual in the swimsuit addition. But tech just ate their business model

50 sats \ 0 replies \ @grayruby OP 26 Jan

Pressure from advertisers to join the woke movement maybe. Get attention?