Gannett Stops Using AI To Write Articles For Now Because They Were Hilariously Terrible
from the i'm-sorry-dave,-but-i-hate-high-school-sports-reporting dept
There may come a time when journalists around the world are left to point at massive datacenters housing AI journo-bots that have perfectly replicated what human journalists can do, screaming “Dey took ‘er jerbs!” like a South Park episode, but today is not that day. And frankly, it doesn’t feel particularly close to being that day. Over the past few months, as AI platforms have exploded in number and notoriety, as have genuinely interesting ways for using those tools exploded, so too have we written a number of posts on attempts to have bots write journalistic articles only to find them to be sub-par in the extreme.
The world of sports journalism has always been considered the kid brother to the big boy and girl journalists. So perhaps you won’t think it as big a deal when a company like Gannett has to admit that its attempt at injecting AI-written articles for local sports news coverage was a failure, but it’s ultimately all the same problem. And in the case of several of these attempts, the problem went viral and everyone had a good laugh at how terrible the output was.
If you’re not much of a sports fan, or don’t read any sports journalism, allow me to highlight the issues in that brief post. First, it sounds as though it was written by a robot. That was drunk. Or possibly high. Or perhaps had played football itself and taken one too many hits to its primary server. It’s devoid of any specifics, such as named players or descriptions of any plays, particularly important scoring plays. Also, scoring 6 points in the final quarter of a football game and losing is not a “spirited fourth-quarter performance.” And “close encounter of the athletic kind”? What the actual hell?
But in case you thought that these publications would have a policy for these articles being reviewed by actual human meat-sacks, or that the above example is as bad as it could get, allow me to disabuse you of both notions with a single article that was written by LedeAI for the Columbus Dispatch.
The Dispatch’s ethical guidelines state that AI content has to be verified by humans before being used in reporting, but it’s unclear whether that step was taken. Another AI-written sports story in the Dispatch initially failed to generate team names, publishing “[[WINNING_TEAM_MASCOT]]” and “[[LOSING_TEAM_MASCOT]].” The Dispatch has since updated AI-generated stories to correct errors.
So, no, clearly these papers aren’t doing any serious form of human-checking of these AI-written posts. And that’s a pretty big god damned problem in a world in which the credibility of journalists and journalism is under such constant assault. Outsourcing journalism to AI that writes like a 7 year old that is thumbing through a thesaurus isn’t going to inspire a great deal of confidence in journalism.
Look, there is likely a place for AI in journalism. But it just isn’t, as of now, in a state in which it can replace journalists. That seems to be the misunderstanding here. AI is a tool for journalists to use, not one that can do the job of journalism.
Filed Under: ai, ai reporting, journalism
Companies: gannett
Comments on “Gannett Stops Using AI To Write Articles For Now Because They Were Hilariously Terrible”
They may not be good, but there are unquestionably news outlets that are laying off writers and posting more LLM-generated content. It’s a terrible idea, and hopefully it backfires hard enough that it stops soon, but it’s certainly happening.
Gizmodo’s doing it. CNET’s doing it and, worse, has purged its archives, evidently because management doesn’t know how SEO works.
Just because these AI-generated articles are lousy and incompetent doesn’t mean they’re not taking people’s jobs.
Re:
Oh, it’s taking people’s jobs, but only because executives are complete morons who don’t have the capacity to learn anything without the government giving them a fine so large they might as well go out of business. Or their bottom line decreasing so quickly that they have no choice but to actually learn something using their brains since the computer can’t tell them what they should do. And all of these executives who decide that substituting workers for AI are going to learn the hard way that AI isn’t what they thought it’d be.
Re: Re:
I mean, yes, but what’s your point?
Mass layoffs are often the result of shortsightedness by incompetents who can’t look past quarterly earnings and the latest buzzword. That doesn’t make them not mass layoffs.
Re:
the difficult part of serious Journalimm is ‘gathering’ the relevant FACTS on the news item being pursued.
with such facts then available, any reasonably educated person can compose those facts into a written report/News-item using standard language.
HOWEVER, AI computers can ONLY handle facts & data GIVEN to it, ultimately from human sources.
AI is basically just a glorified DataBase system tied to a good language processing software.
AI cannot compete with serious professional Journalism, but such quality Journalismm is rare today; so AI will win.
“A Close Encounter of the Athletic Kind”
So the football players were all temporarily captured by football aliens 🏈 👽 from Planet Sports, but were saved by a “spirited performance” as each quarterback took down six UFOs each. That’s the kind of story that would be more believable than AI replacing real human journalists
Re:
Normally I don’t support mysticism in sports, but I guess it is okay if the spirited performance is published by Medium.
Or all three.
Truth
What makes you believe any Journalistic entity is actually reporting the truth? What exactly is the truth in any given situation? Ultimately, all conflict comes down to misunderstanding. I never read news articles ever reporting on this misunderstanding in detail.
Re: wow, man.
Heavy.
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“Ultimately, all conflict comes down to misunderstanding.”
I suppose so ..
I completely misunderstood your desire to invade, rape and pillage this sovereign country, my bad.
– VictimsOfWar
Re:
You must be positively terrified when you come to a street crossing, never able know whether there are or are not cars coming to turn you into road salsa if you try to cross…
Re: Re:
I suspect he/she is perfectly OK with crossing the street but very fearful of terrorists like many citizens.
Last year the US averaged 117 motor vehicle road salsa creating events per day.
Terrorists have only caused 3781 total US deaths between 1970 and 2017 or an average of 80 per year.
They're the same article
I’ve seen worse articles in my local paper written by humans.
Behind every crappy AI is a spreadsheet-jockey decision maker who bought from the lowest bidder.
overusing computer time
How long before complaints begin that AI compute time is using too much energy – like with crypto?
Write three versions of abad headline and call it a story.