Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

awfulannouncing.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 169 posts

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

#141

Post by btown »

btown wrote: post #97
jetrink wrote: post #50

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.

Sports have so much structured data, and such a high bar for describing it accurately (especially for a brand like ESPN), that there are significant risks to the hallucinations that might develop from a multi-hour transcript being fed into an LLM, especially with commentators excited about potential goals and other events that don't end up happening. On the other hand, the rather simple task of "here's a set of goals…

s/accessible/acceptable/ - guess I should have run my comment through the kind of check-for-typos LLM step that I described above!

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

#142

Post by skipants »

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.

That's not quite how it worked.

There are basically two types of content when it comes to these sports recap articles. I'm also excluding opinions/editorials because those are completely different.

1. low profile, not-so-popular content. eg. A Canadian Football League preseason game between the Toronto Argonauts and BC Lions

This was still generated using a template. No human intervention except maybe double-checking it before publishing it. This was before AI, too.

Often it was there for SEO or just updating people via a headline

2. High profile content, eg. Jeremy Lin puts up 38 pts in a game

This is often one of:

- pre-written, especially if we expected to happen that day - withheld from publishing if there was auto-generated content but something crazy happened that game and then quickly re-written and released. Usually this would still at least be pre-written before the game ended and details that needed to wait for the game to end were filled in seconds before/after the game ended.

There's just as much labour put into it now as before. AI is now generating the low profile template instead of the madlibs we did before. The value add is that it's probably a better read, so you actually get user engagement, and better SEO than before.

And this same issue highlighted in the OP article would also happen without AI.

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

#143

Post by locallost »

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…

What makes this article a hit piece actually? Seems like straightforward reporting on facts.

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

#144

Post by awad »

mh- wrote: post #48
skipants wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

You have the Elias Sports Bureau to thank for all the fun baseball stats out there https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elias_Sports_Bureau

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

#145

Post by ToucanLoucan »

skipants wrote: post #142
serial_dev wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not quite how it worked. There are basically two types of content when it comes to these sports recap articles. I'm also excluding opinions/editorials because those are completely different. 1. low profile, not-so-popular content. eg. A Canadian Football League preseason game between the Toronto Argonauts and BC Lions This was still generated using a template. No human intervention except maybe double-checking…

> This was still generated using a template. No human intervention except maybe double-checking it before publishing it. This was before AI, too.

Odd question but is that why the banal reporting on so many websites is such utter shit? Like in all dimensions, it gets facts wrong, it's usually rife with spelling and grammatical errors... when I spend too much time online I start feeling like the sole person on the planet who gives a shit about writing correctly.

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

#148

Post by falcolas »

JAlexoid wrote: post #116
falcolas wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do we feel the need to defend software bugs? Would we give the same defense of banking software that forgot to carry over the fractions of a penny? It's a software bug, and there's plenty of resources available to the AI's owner to try and address it. It doesn't need a human advocating for it being OK.

> It's a software bug Why is it a software bug? Just because you want to see those emotional sprinkles, doesn't mean that the person planning how to create the article decided that. You personally and emotionally decided, without evidence, that this is a bug. No one else is saying that. Imagine if you asked an AI to describe the discovery of radiation, and the AI deiced for you to talk about the personal life of Mari…

> Why is it a software bug?

If you look into the happenings of the game, you'll find that there was a special ceremony held at 13 minutes for the retiring player. It's like summarizing the discovery of radiation and not mentioning Marie Curie at all. It's not emotional sprinkles (which is a pretty messed up way to refer to human interest articles), it's just omitting a notable deviation from the normal game flow is a bug.

We as a community are not used to calling AI failures bugs, but we probably should - it's the most accurate term we have. As is an non-requested backwards joint, or a fan of fingers, on a photorealistic generated image.

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

#149

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#150

Post by acchow »

croes wrote: post #140
serial_dev wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It was template-based. The templates were written by humans. The computers filled in the blanks in the templates and combined templates together.
Post reply on HN