ESPN made a significant announcement on Thursday. The sports activities media big introduced it will implement synthetic intelligence to put in writing recreation recap tales for the Premier Lacrosse League and Nationwide Girls’s Soccer League.
As with something involving the quickly altering alliance of AI and journalism, what adopted had been plenty of questions and a bit uneasiness.
ESPN is making the case that AI helps it cowl “under-served sports activities” — leagues that ESPN at present doesn’t totally cowl with flesh-and-blood sportswriters. In different phrases, this argument appears to be that utilizing AI to cowl sports activities or leagues is healthier than not overlaying them in any respect.
Alternatively? The concern amongst dwelling and respiration journalists that it is a slippery slope, and that AI is taking their jobs. They are saying: As an alternative of utilizing AI to put in writing lacrosse and soccer tales, why doesn’t ESPN simply rent extra journalists? And if ESPN can use AI to cowl these sports activities, what’s to cease them from utilizing AI to cowl increasingly different sports activities?
In its announcement, ESPN laid out the crux of its argument: “The AI-generated recaps goal to boost protection of under-served sports activities, offering followers with content material that was beforehand unavailable. These sports activities don’t at present have recreation recaps on ESPN digital platforms, and these AI-generated recaps might be a device to reinforce current protection — not change it.”
ESPN added, “Every AI-generated recap might be reviewed by a human editor to make sure high quality and accuracy.”
ESPN additionally introduced that will probably be clear which tales had been generated by AI. The highest of the story, the place the standard byline can be, will say, “ESPN Generative AI Companies.” After the story, there might be a tagline that claims, “ESPN Generative AI Companies creates recaps from occasion information and/or transcripts which can be reviewed by human editors earlier than posting; e mail [email protected] for corrections.”
The brand new plan will go into impact at the moment.
ESPN mentioned in its assertion, “The goal is to study, decide how one can responsibly leverage new know-how, and start to determine greatest practices — all whereas augmenting our current protection of choose sports activities and permitting ESPN workers to concentrate on their extra differentiating characteristic, evaluation, investigative, and breaking information protection.”
That final half is an argument that many within the journalism world level to when contemplating the advantages of AI: that the usage of the know-how to put in writing easier articles, equivalent to a recreation story, frees up their journalists to work on greater, so-called “extra essential” tales.
At ESPN’s current “Media Day” assembly with reporters, ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro mentioned, “AI shouldn’t be the terrible, horrible disruptor that many individuals suppose will probably be. I personally consider that AI might be very useful and useful to the sports activities trade and the sports activities fan, and we’re beginning to see that.”
Pitaro gave examples of utilizing the know-how to chop highlights of, once more, lesser-covered sports activities. Pitaro additionally talked about closed captioning, saying, “How can we do closed captioning at scale? AI is already serving to us considerably there. I commute. I drive myself to Bristol every single day. It’s an hour drive for me every method. And I wish to eat our long-form reporting, our investigative reporting, which is tremendous prime quality. Being able to simply click on play and listen to the narration of a long-form investigative story is extremely precious to me as a commuter. These are some examples of how we see this as nothing however constructive for the sports activities fan and for the enterprise.”
ESPN shouldn’t be the primary information group to implement AI this fashion. Entrance Workplace Sports activities’ Margaret Fleming notes that The Related Press makes use of AI.
An AP spokesperson informed Fleming, “AP makes use of synthetic intelligence and automation when it will probably unlock our journalists to do extra significant work. We use AI to provide audio-to-text transcriptions, create brief lists in predictable environments, tag content material for search, and write company earnings stories and a few sports activities preview and recap tales. We additionally use automation for the distribution of monetary markets and sports activities information.”
However all this nonetheless makes some within the journalism world queasy.
Moreover doing a job that has at all times been for precise journalists, AI shouldn’t be identified for writing notably fascinating tales.
In a column for Defector, Luis Paez-Pumar wrote, “The upshot can be that ESPN is beefing up its protection of ‘underserved’ sports activities (and who, pray inform, is answerable for this underserving?) not by hiring individuals who can and already do write these sorts of tales, however quite by feeding current soccer and lacrosse journalists’ work right into a machine geared toward making them out of date. Or, at the least, it should attempt to make them out of date; nothing about AI’s current historical past factors to this being profitable in any method besides fattening the wallets of AI’s self-interested investor-evangelists.”
The AI practice continues to plow ahead, and ESPN is clearly leaping aboard. Used responsibly and judiciously, AI may very well be a useful and worthwhile device for any media firm with out being a detriment to actual journalists. But when the true aim is to easily lower your expenses through the use of AI, notably when it’s an inferior product to a fairly good journalist, it’s laborious to get on board in case you’re a media client.
I’m prepared to provide ESPN the advantage of the doubt with regards to utilizing AI to cowl sports activities leagues they’ve by no means actually coated. However is that this actually only a trial balloon? In that case, let’s see what comes subsequent earlier than we declare this a very good or dangerous concept.
New York Occasions writer A.G. Sulzberger wrote a powerful essay Thursday in regards to the “quiet conflict” towards press freedoms in the USA. And he wrote his prolonged piece for, of all locations, the Occasions’ chief competitor — The Washington Submit. Extra on that call in a second.
However let’s get to what Sulzberger wrote.
Sulzberger asks if the playbook utilized by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to dismantle the information media in his nation may very well be repeated right here.
Sulzberger wrote, “It’s not a loopy query. As they search a return to the White Home, former president Donald Trump and his allies have declared their intention to extend their assaults on a press he has lengthy derided as ‘the enemy of the individuals.’”
He added, “If Trump follows via on guarantees to proceed that marketing campaign in a second time period, his efforts would doubtless be told by his open admiration for the ruthlessly efficient playbook of authoritarians equivalent to Orbán, whom Trump not too long ago met with at Mar-a-Lago and praised as ‘a wise, sturdy, and compassionate chief.’”
Sulzberger mentioned he and colleagues have studied how press freedoms have been attacked in locations equivalent to Hungary, India and Brazil. The international locations could also be totally different, however the playbooks are the identical. They embody issues equivalent to sowing mistrust within the media; normalizing harassment of journalists; exploiting the courts to, as Sulzberger wrote, “successfully impose further logistical and monetary penalties on disfavored journalism;” and, once more as Sulzberger wrote, “use the levers of energy not simply to punish unbiased journalists but in addition to reward those that display fealty to their management.”
That actually sounds acquainted on this nation beneath a sure former president.
Sulzberger wrote, “As that listing makes clear, these leaders have realized that crackdowns on the press are best after they’re at their least dramatic — not the stuff of thrillers however a film so plodding and sophisticated that nobody desires to observe it.”
Sulzberger made it clear that it isn’t his intention to wade into politics, including, “I disagree with those that have steered that the danger Trump poses to the free press is so excessive that information organizations equivalent to mine ought to forged apart neutrality and immediately oppose his reelection. It’s past shortsighted to surrender journalistic independence out of concern that it’d later be taken away.”
He later added, “On the similar time, because the steward of one of many nation’s main information organizations, I really feel compelled to talk out about threats to the free press, as my predecessors and I’ve carried out to leaders of each events. I’m doing so right here, within the pages of an esteemed competitor, as a result of I consider the danger is shared by our complete career, in addition to all who depend upon it.”
This is a vital essay that can not be adequately summed up right here. Carve out 20 minutes to learn it.
In the meantime, Sulzberger addressed why he supplied his piece to the Submit in a memo to his workers on the Occasions, writing, “I’m grateful to The Submit for working it, particularly given the size. It’s simply one other instance of how The Submit, along with being an esteemed competitor, has lengthy been one in every of our closest companions on issues of press freedom. These challenges can’t be solved by one establishment.”
Have suggestions or a tip? Electronic mail Poynter senior media author Tom Jones at [email protected].
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