Arena Group CEO fired following Sports Illustrated AI articles controversy

Arena Group, the publisher of Sports Illustrated, has fired the sports media outlet’s CEO on the heels of a controversy stemming from its reported use of artificial intelligence (AI) to produce content on its website.

The Arena Group, which publishes Sports Illustrated, said Monday that its board of directors had moved to fire CEO Ross Levinsohn.

The board took the action to “improve the operational efficiency and revenue of the company,” the company said.

Manoj Bhargava will serve as Arena Group’s interim chief executive officer effective this week.

Levinsohn’s firing comes just weeks after a bombshell report from media and technology news website Futurism laying out how Sports Illustrated had been “publishing commerce articles bylined by nonexistent writers with AI-generated profile pictures.”

The news sparked widespread backlash and raised new questions about AI’s role in the future of the media.

The Arena Group initially said the Futurism report was “not accurate.”

“The articles in question were product reviews and were licensed content from an external, third-party company, AdVon Commerce,” the company said at the time. “A number of AdVon’s e-commerce articles ran on certain Arena websites. We continually monitor our partners and were in the midst of a review when these allegations were raised.”

Levinsohn was the CEO of Arena Group since 2019 and previously was the publisher of the Los Angeles Times.

Updated: 3:39 p.m.