ESPN Generates Sports Summaries Using AI, But They No Longer Hit the Point

This weekend, ESPN began publishing AI-generated summaries of women’s soccer games, with more sports coming soon. It uses Microsoft’s AI to write each story, with humans simply reviewing each summary for “quality and accuracy.” ESPN claims that These stories will “extend” rather than distract from the rest of the content – ​​but needless to say, people have mixed feelings about this.

It’s not that ESPN is disguising its AI work as human work. In fact, every story advertises itself as being written by “ESPN Generative AI Services,” and ESPN includes a note at the bottom of each article about how the recap is based on a transcript of the sporting event.

ESPN isn’t the only news organization doing this; Associated Press Press Agency began using AI to write sports recaps in 2016, with both organizations pitching it as a way to cover more underserved sports. In addition to football, ESPN will also apply it for lacrosse.

But so far, these stories are very monotonous and basic — and already lack critical nuances, as Parker Molloy notes. One of the stories of the Women’s National Soccer League I didn’t mention the significance of one player’s final game and the emotional moments that occurred in its wake — something ESPN highlighted in a later update to the story.

ESPN argued that AI summaries free up writers to focus on more in-depth work, such as “more diverse stories, analysis, investigations and breaking news coverage,” and in this case, the reporter wrote the entire article on Alex Morgan’s emotional passing.

Columnist Tom Jones wrote for Poynter last week that despite ESPN’s justification that AI gives journalists the ability to do more meaningful work, there is nothing to stop ESPN from “using AI to cover more and more sports” in the future.

Jones points to Luis Paez-Pumara column for Deserterwhere he writes that ESPN is “introducing the work of existing football and lacrosse journalists into a machine designed to make them redundant” rather than hiring them to do that work.

ESPN says it does indeed plan to expand these AI summaries to more sports. Football and lacrosse are just its “first experiments with AI-generated content.”