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ESPN AI recap of Alex Morgan’s final professional match fails to mention her

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Re: ESPN AI recap of Alex Morgan’s final professional match fails to mention her

#13
How are these AI recaps generated? Are they fed a video file of the entire game and it spits out a summary, or maybe a score tally with timestamps for goals (written by a human) which the AI then pads with language and makes into a story?

Re: ESPN AI recap of Alex Morgan’s final professional match fails to mention her

#14
post #8

I know we're supposed to be shaking our fist at these stupid AIs, but why should Morgan be mentioned? Did she score any goals? Did she get much playing time? I didn't watch the game myself, but it's entirely possible she did nothing notable on the field. So is the AI really mistaken?

Because sports is not just numbers.

It isn't computers and digits and statistics. It's people and personalities and how they interact. There's a reason sports is called a reflection of "the human drama."

Except for the Olympics, I don't watch or follow any sports. But I know enough to know that sports is about people.

The only people who think it's nothing more than numbers are people with gambling addictions.

Re: ESPN AI recap of Alex Morgan’s final professional match fails to mention her

#15
post #11

[flagged]

That's all fine but especially for a news site with millions of visitors (that also generates over 1B in profit a year) I expect Disney to screen ai content with a team of editors to ensure it at least meets a quality standard even if it's basic information.

Re: ESPN AI recap of Alex Morgan’s final professional match fails to mention her

#17

ESPN removed the humans from reporting, and the AI removed the humans from the report. In their announcement of the service, ESPN made a point to note that “each AI-generated recap will be reviewed by a human editor to ensure quality and accuracy.” It’s unclear if the human editor failed to notice Morgan’s absence or also decided it was not worth mentioning. "Blame the intern" has been the great scapegoat for the las…

That was my read, too - basically, "We have a teenager in India that quickly scans through a thousand AI-generated articles per day, looking for offensive language or anything that could get us sued, but that's it."

Re: ESPN AI recap of Alex Morgan’s final professional match fails to mention her

#18

How are these AI recaps generated? Are they fed a video file of the entire game and it spits out a summary, or maybe a score tally with timestamps for goals (written by a human) which the AI then pads with language and makes into a story?

If I was going to build this prototype I'd start with just a semistructured textual play by play recap as the input. Also including roster, injury, amd schedule information with a fairly basic prompt would probably go a long way.

This data exists for most live games at this point via various web services. I'm sure espn has significant resources internally to source that info

Re: ESPN AI recap of Alex Morgan’s final professional match fails to mention her

#19

It's pretty funny to me that this is used as a hit-piece against AI generated content. Here's an open-secret for everyone: web-based sports content companies have been automatically generating content articles for at least a decade; way before LLMs became popular. It is and was mostly done for search ranking. The more seemingly applicable content, the better your SEO. This situation has probably happened several time…

> has gone unnoticed or noticed to little fanfare

To be fair, I don't think it's gone unnoticed at all

Re: ESPN AI recap of Alex Morgan’s final professional match fails to mention her

#20

How are these AI recaps generated? Are they fed a video file of the entire game and it spits out a summary, or maybe a score tally with timestamps for goals (written by a human) which the AI then pads with language and makes into a story?

Back when I worked on it, before AI, you have all the information from a game in an API and you just fill in the template with it.

Now, I imagine they take that raw API call and just use a prompt like, "write a summary article for a game using this data" and it spits it out. And I assume the prompt is more thought out than that (or not? It is ESPN after all).

I don't ever remember "retiring_players" being part of an API response, though, ;P

edit: Oh and yes, the play by play recap is documented EXTREMELY well. You would be surprised. The more popular sports like Gridiron Football and Basketball would literally have player locations by the second. This data all comes from feeds like SportsRadar.

They probably wouldn't pipe the fine tuned stuff like that in to a prompt, but you still have a decent summary like how many 3-pointers someone had and where they shot them from.

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