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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

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is definitely an argument for having a human proofread the article, but for all we know the recap could have been proofread by someone with as much understanding of soccer drama as the AI itself. These articles were mostly written by low paid writers, that already lack the interest in the field. Most of them lacked nuance of recaps, because of who was writing them. And who are we to say that some disinterested…

Well, we can risk of having a disinterested writer write a boring recap of a game, or we can guarantee that a disinterested LLM will write a boring recap of a game. The only difference is that it's cheaper for the CEOs to call an OpenAI API than pay a writer a salary. If corporations are going to try to justify adopting AI (and the mass layoffs that naturally comes with that), then the AI has to produce work that's n…

Or... We can have 1 highly paid specialist review recaps and adjust the prompt to the LLM, instead of 100 low paid disinterested writers producing crap articles(like they already do today)

Why should we race to the bottom to just employ people? Why do we need another Buzzfeed?

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

#122
post #95

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…

What web have you been browsing in the past 5+ years? It's not only sports "content". Any kind of content is drowned into low quality SEO pages. Auto generated or not, it's as useless. LLMs just generate it cheaper.

What a weird and rude way to call this out. The parent wasn’t talking about non-sports content and never suggested that sports writing was the only type of content plagued by SEO spam.

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

#123
post #88

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)

> In defense of the AI - the fact that it was her last match has little relevance to the game itself. Only if you view the game as a cold emotionless process where the important thing is simply the data coming out, rather than the entirely human construct it is.

Recaps are boring. They are intended to be.

If you want the drama, that permeates any soccer game - you watch the game, read a 10 page review or watch a long review video.

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

#124
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…

Indeed. This doesn't really have anything to do with the limitations of AI inherently, but more about using it better.

It seems like it highlights a clear avenue for improvment: rather than just feeding the events of a game to the LLM and asking it to summarize them, it seems important for the prompt to include summaries of e.g. the last 10 news stories involving participants in the game (players, coaches, etc.) and maybe the 10 top all-time news stories as well.

Then the prompt can be asked to summarize the game (not the other information), but to draw from the other information where it might make the article better.

Seems like exactly the kind of things LLM's can do, right?

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

#125
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a "kitchen sink" approach, that produces really bad articles that are hard to read.

Thats your subjective opinion again, and thats fine you are entitled to it. But there are many different types of people who might disagree with you or prefer something different. You seem to be just stating that what you want is what everyone should think is best.

This is literally what good editorial is. That's what makes best articles in journalism.

No one, including you, is interested in every single detail. And no one, including you, will read a novel for every single game.(and every single soccer game can easily become a novel)

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

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI transcription & LLM is likely more costly than what they're willing to splurge on this. Care to link soccer.txt, so I can try with Llama 3 / 3.1?

too costly? it’s probably a few cents total

And it got the most basic detail, the score of the game, wrong. Even at the cost of only a few cents it's worthless.

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

#127
post #79

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…

So you're are telling me AI is as bad as the previous method, with more data and higher energy consumption?

Well, previously you needed an intern working maybe an hour (of they actually wrote good content, obviously more), that intern needs food, air conditioning / heating, so I'm not sure which consumes less energy. Now you have it in a minute and for a predictable low fee.

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

#128
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're are telling me AI is as bad as the previous method, with more data and higher energy consumption?

Well, previously you needed an intern working maybe an hour (of they actually wrote good content, obviously more), that intern needs food, air conditioning / heating, so I'm not sure which consumes less energy. Now you have it in a minute and for a predictable low fee.

And that intern still needs good, and air conditioning/heating, but now can’t pay for them. Still, at least the share values are up a little.

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

#129
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…

It was well-known to people who cared about this (i.e., anyone who would read this recap) that this was Alex Morgan's last game. If ESPN can't capture this and incorporate it into their piece, given their wide reach in sports media, why should a publisher use the ESPN recap service instead of random Y Combinator startup?

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

#130
Everyone’s missing the point here. You’re all saying this isn’t an AI failure directly because the humans in the loop failed to provide the AI with data. That’s true, but imagine this system automating news articles for CNN or whatever, and it’s supposed to be about some minor meeting of government officials, but tens of thousands of fans are NOT watching this meeting, like they are the soccer game, and then the AI fails to report on the officials deciding to, say, tear down the local library because it’s old and useless.

It doesn’t matter if the humans in the loop are at fault, technically, for the omission, the fact that AI replaced a human who could have been tasked with going to the actual events and writing about them was the reason the events were misreported!

We’re the technologists who are supposed to think hard about how to safely implement technology like this and instead of pointing out flaws and carefully testing things, we’re just cheering on tech we don’t understand how to use or get working properly!

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