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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

#31

Post by zero-sharp »

xhkkffbf wrote: post #8

I know we're supposed to be shaking our fist at these stupid AIs, but why should Morgan be mentioned? Did she score any goals? Did she get much playing time? I didn't watch the game myself, but it's entirely possible she did nothing notable on the field. So is the AI really mistaken?

She's a big name in soccer and she's retiring. I don't even watch soccer and I recognize her name. It doesn't matter what her performance was in her final game. It's very common to give great athletes recognition (at the very least mention) at their retirement. Your comment is bewildering (tone-deaf).

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

#32

Post by mason55 »

erickj wrote: post #18
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?

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

Yeah it feels like the ideal way is to feed in a transcript of the announcer audio + some standard stats. That would ensure you catch both the human stories & the factual content.

But I wonder if there are licensing issues with using the audio/transcript to generate your summary. I know that the raw stats are public domain but I wouldn't be surprised if they can't use the transcripts or audio.

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

#33

Post by mp05 »

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…

> It's pretty funny to me that this is used as a hit-piece against AI generated content.

Is it though? My takeaway was that they lament the terrible "journalistic" standards that ESPN embraces.

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

#35

Post by dubrie »

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)

They literally stopped the game in the 13th minute (her jersey number) and subbed her out. Substituting someone that early in a match is typically because of injury and would have relevance to the overall outcome.

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

#36

Post by mattmaroon »

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?

There are a couple companies that provide real time sports data via API (or recaps after) so I’d bet they use that.

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

#37

Post by soperj »

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 early next morning.

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

#38

Post by imzadi »

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)

According to the article, ESPN said that human editors would review the AI recaps to ensure accuracy, so it wasn't just the AI recap that decided to leave it out.

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

#39

Post by JAlexoid »

segasaturn wrote: post #24
zooq_ai wrote: post #11

[flagged]

People are very tired of the "move fast and break things" approach of the last decade and a half. Especially when the technology in question is being used to replace real jobs done by real people (in an already very tough job market). The only people benefiting from implimentations of AI like this are the CEOs and executives, who I wouldn't call "hackers" either.

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 writer would have produced an article any different? After all generative AI only generates articles using the body of data that it's trained on... which leads me to believe that most articles fail to provide player profiles in their recaps in any case.

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

#40

Post by LanceH »

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)

Sounds like a selling point of the AI to me, if Morgan really wasn't instrumental to the game (it's common for a forward to just disappear for most of the match).

It's hard to watch anything by ESPN or NBC when you're just interested in the game and all they want to do is feed you everyone's backstory, or they're only interested in big name players.

For instance, the year after the Mavs beat the Heat to win the NBA championship, they face off in the first game of the year. Nevermind that the Mavs are the defending charmpions, the Heat had LeBron James and Dwayne Wade. They showed 8 highlights from the game, all from the Heat. The Mavs won the game.

An impartial AI recap does not have a high bar to get over.

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