Paradium’s continued focus on AI for publishing is fascinating in light of its not-so-distant history with AI scandal. Back in November 2023, a Futurism investigation revealed that the company, then still called The Arena Group, had published AI-generated content bylined by fake AI writers on the website of Sports Illustrated, which at the time was the company’s crown jewel. (The content had been provided by a third-party contractor, AdVon Commerce, which published similar content at other partners across the media ecosystem.) Several executives, including then-CEO Ross Levinsohn, were fired soon after, and The Arena Group ultimately lost control of the Sports Illustrated brand.
Fast forward a few years, the company is now called Paradium, and AI content is central to its business model.
Paradium isn’t the only media company to suffer bleak downturns amid all-in AI pivots: BuzzFeed, once a giant of the content economy of the 2010s, also reported somber Q3 results as its own controversial AI push has yet to pay off.
As part of its rebrand, the company announced its purchase of InfoSentience, an AI company described on Paradium’s homepage as a product that “turns live structured data into accurate, on-brand stories” to deliver “AI content at scale, running in production today.”
In other words, they are now indistinguishable from the millions of other AI-generated sites. They’re not really collapsing, they’re just sinking to the appropriate level.