Gannett Halts AI-Written Sports Recaps After Readers Mocked the Stories – Slashdot

Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading! Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday September 03, 2023 @04:45PM from the football-fantasies dept. CNN reports that newspaper chain Gannett “has paused the use of an AI tool to write high school sports dispatches after the technology made several major flubs in articles in at least one of its papers.” In one notable example, preserved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, the story began: “The Worthington Christian [[WINNING_TEAM_MASCOT]] defeated the Westerville North [[LOSING_TEAM_MASCOT]] 2-1 in an Ohio boys soccer game on Saturday….” The reports were mocked on social media for being repetitive, lacking key details, using odd language and generally sounding like they’d been written by a computer with no actual knowledge of sports. CNN identified several other local Gannett outlets, including the Louisville Courrier Journal, AZ Central, Florida Today and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, that have all published similar stories written by LedeAI in recent weeks. Many of the reports feature identical language, describing “high school football action,” noting when one team “took victory away from” another and describing “cruise-control” wins. In many cases, the stories also repeated the date of the games being covered
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