Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images for Sports Illustrated
- The Arena Group, which publishes fitness and lifestyle content, is the latest in media to tap into AI.
- The company announced its deal with generative AI startups Jasper and Nota to help make posts.
- BuzzFeed and CNET have reportedly also looked to AI to produce stories.
If you’re perusing Men’s Journal looking to make gains, you can expect to encounter some old fitness wisdom repackaged by an AI program.
The Arena Group, which publishes sports and lifestyle brands including Sports Illustrated and Men’s Journal, said on Friday that it’s teaming up with the startups Nota and the generative AI darling Jasper, to help produce articles and ideas for stories. The tie-up was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
The Arena Group said that it’s been testing the AI bot technology in part by feeding old content through it. For instance, the Men’s Journal article, “The Best Ways for Men Over 40 to Maintain Muscle” was in part the product of AI technology that had scanned “17 years” of content from the Men’s Fitness section of Men’s Journal, according to a statement by The Arena Group.
But the group added that human editors were involved in the production of such stories, which include a note on the site reassuring readers that they were “reviewed and fact-checked by our editorial team.”
“While AI will never replace journalism, reporting, or crafting and editing a story, rapidly improving AI technologies can create enterprise value for our brands and partners,” Ross Levinsohn, CEO of The Arena Group, said in the company’s statement.
Content produced by the bot was apparently also succeeding on performance metrics sometimes used to evaluate how journalists are doing their jobs. Arena said that tests of the technology showed that the articles it helped generate had “strong audience engagement” in the form of page views and other metrics.
Overall, it improved “workflow efficiencies by more than 10 times the normal rate,” the company said. Arena didn’t detail exactly how it determined such workflow efficiencies or how it calculated the improvement.
Meanwhile, the company expects AI use will only grow: Arena said it expects that some 250 outlets it publishes will use the technology.
Jasper, which uses OpenAI’s GPT-3 model, made waves last year with its $125 million Series A round that puts its valuation at $1.5 billion.
Other media companies looking to jump on the OpenAI tech bandwagon include BuzzFeed, which is planning to use AI to help make quizzes. CNET has also experimented with using AI to write posts, the Washington Post reported.
