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

151–160 of 169 posts

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

#151

Post by acchow »

whimsicalism wrote: post #134
brewdad wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You should just need a better prompt. I think everyone would benefit from using a standardized prompt which asks the model to think through its work between `` tags before writing its response, and also reflecting on the response between `` tags, and then outputting the final response afterwards

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

#152

Post by jjmarr »

bloomingeek wrote: post #137
add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm OK with didactic commentators if the person talking to me is an expert and giving me new information.

Broadcast media outlets fail at that. I don't know much about sports but even I can tell that people on TV are speaking in vague generalities so they can never be proven wrong. I get told that the team that lost "didn't want to win" as if people getting paid millions a year to win at sports aren't motivated.

When people are afraid of being proven wrong above all else, they avoid making any substantive claims. If someone isn't afraid of that, they'll make more interesting predictions I can't get elsewhere, and eventually it'll be a more enjoyable product because I can make fun of that person for being wrong.

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

#153

Post by dwighttk »

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…

Those articles were awful and at least some were noticeable

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

#154

Post by skipants »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #145
skipants wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 plan…

Probably money in, money out. I think the content you're looking at _is_ underpaid interns. As another comment mention, sports data is actually very structured these days and its easy to automatically generate articles with it. Actual news, probably not so much.

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

#155

Post by jdthedisciple »

To be fair, this is probably not a genuine "failure" on the LLM's part

but most likely the result of opposite-end backlash from the past where LLM's would name people in a way that could compromise their privacy

upon which they were made "safer" by AI companies making stop dropping names as much as possible

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

#156

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

#157

Post by rideontime »

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 intern already exists and consumes those things, though.

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

#158

Post by tantalor »

acchow wrote: post #151
whimsicalism wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You should just need a better prompt. I think everyone would benefit from using a standardized prompt which asks the model to think through its work between ` ` tags before writing its response, and also reflecting on the response between ` ` tags, and then outputting the final response afterwards

Easy, just instruct the LLM to not hallucinate the score, problem solved.

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

#159

Post by JumpCrisscross »

fmbb wrote: post #111
echelon wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I see SEO as a make work project to support Wall Street valuations. You're missing the whole middle part about users and revenue. SEO alone does not a Wall Street valuation make. Maybe the indictment here should instead be about discovery and how we share ideas and utility with one another.

> You're missing the whole middle part about users and revenue. SEO alone does not a Wall Street valuation make. Are they? Or are you over-estimating that part?

> Are they?

Do you have an example of a company whose valuation is driven principally by eyeballs? Not metrics tied to eyeballs, e.g. ad revenue. Just eyeballs.

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

#160

Post by YeahThisIsMe »

omgJustTest wrote: post #47
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.

But sports reporting has pretty much always been this way.

Unless anything extraordinary happens, every post game interview features the same questions with the same answers and every article about the game looks the same with only the names of the participating players and their stats changing.

Post reply on HN