But the stewardship by Authentic Brands and Arena has been particularly rocky. Because Authentic Brands retains the rights to Sports Illustrated’s brand, Arena’s options for generating revenue are somewhat limited, encouraging a daily churn of articles. Employees have complained publicly that Arena has been dismissive of concerns about article quality and a lack of editors — made worse in February when 17 members of the staff were laid off — all while enforcing weekly quotas from writers.

Last month, the newspaper publisher Gannett found itself in a situation very similar to Sports Illustrated’s. Product reviews on a site that Gannett owns, Reviewed, looked suspiciously like articles not written by humans, and nobody who works for Reviewed recognized the purported authors. A spokeswoman for Gannett said the articles had been “created by third-party freelancers hired by a marketing agency partner, not A.I.” That marketing agency partner was AdVon.

G/O Media, CNET and The Columbus Dispatch in Ohio have also experienced controversies related to publishing articles written by computers without adequate human oversight. The Associated Press, whose policies are often adopted as standards throughout the news industry, recently released its own artificial intelligence guidelines. They say that any output from A.I. tools should “be treated as unvetted source material,” and that The A.P. would not use images generated by artificial intelligence.