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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

#131

Post by alt227 »

JAlexoid wrote: post #125
alt227 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Thanks for telling me what I want. You will get far in life that way!

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

#132

Post by jonas21 »

> ESPN did post a separate article on their outlets from writer Jeff Kassouf that is all about Morgan and the emotional night. However, that article is located on the side menu of the AI-generated recap and is easy to miss.

So... there was a human-written article to cover the human interest side of the story and an AI-written technical recap of the game. What's the issue?

And regarding the complaint about the link in the sidebar, it's easy to miss only if you came in directly to the AI-generated article. If you go to the main site, they prominently feature the human-generated content [1].

[1] https://www.espn.com/soccer/

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

#133

Post by skipants »

fullshark wrote: post #120
LordDragonfang wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think people have noticed if not explicitly. They end up going toward platforms that have real humans on them (social media, message boards, substack) and not really understanding it's because they read a bunch of algorithmically generated noise on "traditional" published websites and moved on.

I don't think people did notice. Our view counts for sports articles were always very low, except the very high profile articles. And those ones would always be done by a copywriter and properly edited.

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

#134

Post by whimsicalism »

brewdad wrote: post #126
whimsicalism wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

seems like this is a solvable problem with just a bit more engineering effort, but yeah... totally worthless

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

#135

Post by parasense »

Honestly, don't care...

The machines simpley obey their instructions, which was presumably to fluff out some words about who scored points, who defended from those who wished to score points, etc...

Ignoring the halftime events seems like a plausibly sane thing for a sports stats fanatic to have happen, and that's exactly what happened here.

Was this an AI/ML geneerated thing? I would question your definition of AI, unless a serries of IF/ELSE statements satisfies your concept of AI... It's just following the rules it was given.

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

#136

Post by williamcotton »

soperj wrote: post #37
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…

> ensuring that one of the copywriters manually updated this particular article. Clearly it was never "there" yet though previously, and obviously still isn't when this article is what's generated. You can tell that a lot of sports articles are essentially "fill in the blank", which is why they get the AP stories up right away, and then have their actual beat reporters come out with something later that night, or ear…

Beat reporters will also write during the game, and if I’m remembering correctly, will work on differing versions of the ultimate winner at the same time.

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

#137

Post by bloomingeek »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #84
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…

ESPN has been in decline since longer than LLMs have been around. More explicit use of AI is just accelerating the downward spiral.

Absolutely correct! In the old days it was mostly video replay and witty banter describing what you were watching, which was fun to watch. Now it's become something I couldn't care less about, which is less video and someone telling me what I should think about what I just watched.

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

#138

Post by karpatic »

serial_dev wrote: post #127
croes wrote: 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.

The efficiency gains are undeniable, and AI can scale in ways that were unimaginable before. Less grunt work, more room for innovation—hopefully, we can reinvest that time and energy wisely.

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

#139

Post by skipants »

spencerchubb wrote: post #82
skipants wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think people do actually consume it. In my experience this content was purely for SEO or maybe just a headline that people read quickly to keep up-to-date. The actual article content is rarely seen by a human.

isn't the point of seo to get in front of consumers?

Yes, but not for these articles. Here's a example situation where having good SEO with filler content that makes sense: Lebron James retires.

If you are faster and have the best SEO at that point in time then that means everyone trying to read about Lebron James retiring is going to search it in Google and is going to read your article first, and you're getting the ad revenue. It's a 90/10 situation. The "top" website in the rankings is going to get 90% of the clicks.

You can only be the "top" if your SEO to that point is also the "best". And to have that you need to have all this generated content.

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

#140

Post by croes »

serial_dev wrote: post #127
croes wrote: 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.

Did they need an intern?

Doesn't sound so.

>web-based sports content companies have been automatically generating content articles for at least a decade

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