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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

#41

Post by xyst »

segasaturn wrote: post #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?

The gaps between expectations and reality of “genAI” is too vast at this point to ignore. If a multibillion dollar system breaks down because of “human error”, then maybe its capabilities are way overstated. If it needs carefully crafted queries (“prompt engineering”), 100% error proof data, a megaton of power, and humans still need to re-check the output. What have we gained?

Can we all just admit this AI phase is just a bubble?

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

#42

Post by xyst »

admjs wrote: post #25

They could probably solve this by adding an audio transcript from the tv feed. Commentators share a lot of random facts and insights during games, and that would certainly enrich the AI summary.

Commentators are also often wrong, which would also be a disaster to repeat on print.

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

#43

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

JAlexoid wrote: post #27

In defense of the AI - the fact that it was her last match has little relevance to the game itself. These are the emotional sprinkles, that AI often misses.(Which is to be expected from an emotionless AI)

Right, and what AI misses is that the narrative of the game itself should be superseded (or at least complemented) by the unique additional subtext. It's not a defense of AI that it was oblivious to the most interesting angle.

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

#44

Post by sigmar »

If "this is the last game for Alex Morgan" wasn't included as any part of the input/prompt, how on earth could the AI summary have come up with this for inclusion in the game recap?

If some teenage intern was given a table with the goals scored (player and minute mark), they would have written a similar article... but that's definitely not a good excuse for news orgs and sports sites to just use generative AI for everything, so I can see why people are annoyed with ESPN.

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

#45

Post by LordDragonfang »

airstrike wrote: post #19
skipants wrote: post #10

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

Not by people in the know, no. But I'd say 80% of "normal" people reading sports websites probably had no idea until now, and the only difference is that (gen)AI is suddenly a "feature" to be boasted about to customers to make shareholders happy. And suddenly all of these normal people are starting to have opinions on it.

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

#46

Post by HelloMcFly »

sigmar wrote: post #44

If "this is the last game for Alex Morgan" wasn't included as any part of the input/prompt, how on earth could the AI summary have come up with this for inclusion in the game recap? If some teenage intern was given a table with the goals scored (player and minute mark), they would have written a similar article... but that's definitely not a good excuse for news orgs and sports sites to just use generative AI for eve…

I don't think the critique is "how stupid of the AI" but rather "this is one example of how AI content falls short" even when it is supposedly reviewed by a human as ESPN claims

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

#47

Post by omgJustTest »

skipants wrote: post #10

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…

Well AI certainly didn't make it better in this case.

The fact that it is profitable to make this generic sports-lingo-laced content is, on its own, pretty depressing.

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

#48

Post by mh- »

skipants wrote: post #30
erickj wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I assume this is what lets baseball games show obscure factoids like "3rd in the NL West when facing left-handed pitchers on Tuesday"?

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

#49

Post by dylan604 »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #12

To whom was this not apparent as the most likely outcome of going down this path?

this is precisely what I would expect to hear from the echo chamber of HN where the readers are too focused on the tech than on the users of the tech.

AI has been promoted as the best thing since best thing references were created. Of course people that understand the tech will know it's not really that great, but the people being sold the tech just accept the brochure as gospel and think it is amazing.

Do you think that anyone making the decisions on how many human journalists/editors to employee know how AI works, or that they hear the promise of being able to use even fewer humans and run with it?

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

#50

Post by jetrink »

This match was broadcast by ESPN on both ESPN2 and ESPN+. In that case, they are presumably paying two knowledgeable commentators to talk about the match before, during, and after it happens, adding context and describing the important events. Are they not providing a transcript of that to the writerbot? That seems like real low-hanging fruit, especially since the commentary is already live captioned.
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