Live data from Hacker News

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

awfulannouncing.com

21–30 of 169 posts

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

#23
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?

Here, I'll give you the paragraph from the article which talks about your point, since you must have have missed it:

"You could certainly make the case that everything in the recap is accurate from a factual perspective. However, the fact that it doesn’t include any information about Morgan and how important this night was for her, the NWSL, and U.S. women’s soccer speaks to how these kinds of services can’t replicate human writers who can see an event from a 360-degree perspective."

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

#24
post #11

[flagged]

People are very tired of the "move fast and break things" approach of the last decade and a half. Especially when the technology in question is being used to replace real jobs done by real people (in an already very tough job market). The only people benefiting from implimentations of AI like this are the CEOs and executives, who I wouldn't call "hackers" either.

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

#26
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.

This is a really romantic view of sports, and a strong attack against the strawman argument that's been advanced by nobody ("sports is just numbers").

But to answer the OP's original question: no, she didn't do anything worth mentioning in the game per the newly updated ESPN article. Her team was dominated, losing by 3.

"It was the final game in the nearly 14-year career of USWNT star Alex Morgan. The two-time World Cup winner and Olympic gold medalist played 15 minutes, exiting in the first half. Her shot on goal in the 10th minute was saved by Courage goalie Casey Murphy."

So should she have been mentioned in the article? Yes, but not for her performance and not in the context of her play in the match.

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

#28

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…

[deleted]

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

#29
post #9

I've seen a bunch of these articles now and a lot seem to have these sort of "context explainer" paragraphs that seem like they're there as filler to explain the context of the events. However, they're almost always so general, or even elementary that anyone who would bother to read the article would already know that stuff would wonder why a sports writer would write it. There's zero need for them for the audience t…

These websites are packed with trackers and ads, and are just drawn out incredibly low effort stories reporting on mostly meaningless content.

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

#30
post #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

I don't think ESPN does anything that takes significant resources. That's all handled by SportsRadar or ... there's another big provider but their name alludes me. They basically firehose you all the game information as structured data and you can use it programmatically however you'd like.
Post reply on HN