ESPN explained the announcement last week in a press release:
Using generative AI technology, ESPN will provide fans with incremental game recap stories for the Premier Lacrosse League (PLL) and National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL). The added coverage will augment existing coverage, and the initiative will extend to some other sports in the future.
The AI-generated recaps aim to enhance coverage of under-served sports, providing fans with content that was previously unavailable. These sports do not currently have game recaps on ESPN digital platforms, and these AI-generated recaps will be a tool to augment existing coverage – not replace it.
Each AI-generated recap will be reviewed by a human editor to ensure quality and accuracy. Additionally, content created by AI will be clearly indicated for fans, via the byline – “ESPN Generative AI Services” – at the top of each recap and with a tagline at the bottom of each story: “ESPN Generative AI Services creates recaps from event data and/or transcripts that are reviewed by human editors before posting; email support@espncustomercare.com for corrections.”
At launch, ESPN will leverage Microsoft AI technology with a training process, prompts, and requirements specific to this initiative that have been collaboratively developed by ESPN and Disney teams, along with Accenture.
This innovation project was incubated through the ESPN Edge Innovation Center as an initiative that reflects ESPN’s commitment to embracing emerging technologies to drive innovation as a purposeful, responsible experimentation with AI technology.
The aim is to learn, determine how to responsibly leverage new technology, and begin to establish best practices – all while augmenting our existing coverage of select sports and allowing ESPN staff to focus on their more differentiating feature, analysis, investigative, and breaking news coverage.
But already the new AI summary report has shown to be bland and incomplete.
The Verge reported: ‘But so far, the stories are very bland, basic write-ups — and they’re already missing important nuance, as Parker Molloy points out. One of the National Women’s Soccer League stories failed to mention the significance of one player’s final game and the emotional moments that happened as a result, something ESPN waved at with a later update to the story.’
‘Columnist Tom Jones wrote for Poynter last week that despite ESPN’s justification that AI frees up journalists for more impactful work, there’s nothing stopping ESPN “from using AI to cover more and more other sports” down the line,’ the tech outlet added.
AUTHOR COMMENTARY
Real journalism is dead. Most writers for mainstream and alternative press are just corporate shills who have no creative freedom, and authors with some autonomy are usually very out of touch and very dull making them very unrelatable and uninformed. But now everything is only getting faker and faker by the day. Hardly anything we see and hear online and in the media can be believed.
1 Corinthians 1:20 Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?
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[7] Who goeth a warfare any time at his own charges? who planteth a vineyard, and eateth not of the fruit thereof? or who feedeth a flock, and eateth not of the milk of the flock? [8] Say I these things as a man? or saith not the law the same also? [9] For it is written in the law of Moses, Thou shalt not muzzle the mouth of the ox that treadeth out the corn. Doth God take care for oxen? [10] Or saith he it altogether for our sakes? For our sakes, no doubt, this is written: that he that ploweth should plow in hope; and that he that thresheth in hope should be partaker of his hope. (1 Corinthians 9:7-10).
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Watch the game, write what ya saw: how tuff can it be, oh the loser’s feelings can’t be hurt, or the writer is a numb scull. Nobody watches ESPN anyway, me thinks that’s the cause.
I’d rather play with rocks than watch ESPN or SportsCenter, they’re about as exciting and edifying as watching ice melt.
The Bread and Circus distractions will soon fall apart and fail.
I rather read something with typos but has uniqueness and a man’s soul into it, than something “perfectly” written by a glorified automaton.
(“Perfect” writing, which many of these publicly released AI programs can’t even do half the time, with some exceptions. Maybe the unreleased, more advanced ones the government’s holding onto can. Why the quotation marks? Well, we know there’s only one perfectly written book in the world.)