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Do people actually read sports illustrated anymore? I didn’t know they were even relevant since like 2015
I always knew Albert Breer was not a real person
What do you mean? I just got drinks with him at {—bar—}
The only upside of A.I. is that I might be gone by the time it crushes humanity, the downside my grandchildren will live to see the epic failures of humanity’s greed.
Dumb take.
Just don’t have kids. Problem solved.
IIRC that sports journalism was already one of the fields that was quickly being automated even before AI started to be in the news all of the time.
Stuff such as box scores, certain plays, etc can all be automatically pulled various game stats and/or play by play recordings. Those are things that can almost be automated with boilerplate statements and needs minimal human and/or AI work to smooth out the boilerplate into something more cohesive.
The Associated Press started using AI to publish reports on company earnings in 2014. Using it is not new, but abusing it is.
Tell that to Journatic
As the link you provided explains, Journatic was not AI. Journatic was hiring Filipinos for 35 cents an article and selling the work as being done by local reporters.
Mechanical Turk or actual software isn’t the point. They were hiding the fact that they were outsourcing to cheaper labor pools with lower level of accountability behind fake reporter names.
It is the point, you’ve just decided to make a different point. That’s fine, it adds to the conversation, but that isn’t what was being talked about. What was being talked about was using AI to write articles. Journatic was not doing that.
I’m curious who actually reads postgame write ups anymore. That content can now be digested in the form of podcasts
Who has time for a podcast?
People who don’t like podcasts and/or just want to quickly skim over stuff.
Even postgame recap podcasts will probably be automated to some extent quite soon once you get better text to speech programs.
what is even the point of that? you can go to a website and do text to speech. i thought podcasts were meant to offer insight and opinions. listening to an ai read box scores sounds painfully dull
Which podcasts do you listen to?
My point is that most of the sports writing outside of a few good beat reporters is very generic. You can notice the patterns very quickly for most of the bread and butter articles released by most websites.
A good AI/boilerplate can make it a narrative. Team X went up, then continued to maintain a lead with additional scores until Team Z finally scored. Then…
There are ways to make stuff interesting.
This is getting to be more and more common.
Combined with the how loose media outlets are getting with “facts” means our society is moving in a genuinely scary direction.
Yep, the article gets more depressing as you read on because you see how common it is
We caught CNET and Bankrate, both owned by Red Ventures, publishing barely-disclosed AI content that was filled with factual mistakes and even plagiarism; in the ensuing storm of criticism, CNET issued corrections to more than half its AI-generated articles. G/O Media also published AI-generated material on its portfolio of sites, resulting in embarrassing bungles at Gizmodo and The A.V. Club. We caught BuzzFeed publishing slapdash AI-generated travel guides. And USA Today and other Gannett newspapers were busted publishing hilariously garbled AI-generated sports roundups that one of the company’s own sports journalists described as “embarrassing,” saying they “shouldn’t ever” have been published.
also flashback to MSN publishing that “useless at 42” obituary
I’m convinced ESPN has been doing this for years. So many typos, so many bizarre factual errors that even casual sports fans would know at first glance were incorrect, yet somehow people who cover sports for a living and their editors (if they even use editors) are missing them?
lol our beat writer almost literally never gets our players’ names right, even for the superstars.
Sports Illustrated’s Football preview used to be one of the highlights of the year
Sports Illustrated has been irrelevant for years since they awarded the ‘Sportsman of the Year’ award in 2017 to Jose Altuve despite the infamous Astros cheating scandal uncovered.
Since they gave their 2016 award to LeBron over the Chicago Cubs or Leicester City, considering the magnitude and significance of what those clubs accomplished.
Since they failed to award the 2015 honor to the racehorse American Pharaoh, who helped deliver the first triple crown in 37 years (ending a supposed-curse in thoroughbred).
They’ve been irrelevant as they’ve angled NFL/NBA-centric stories over other, broad leagues, while reducing their own aura with “regional” covers.
“To Altuve in 2017 despite the cheating scandal uncovered”
Story didn’t break until November 2019. Altuve and JJ co-won it because they were the respective bright spots of Houston sports. They were the faces of their respective franchises. Altuve won MVP after having several top finishes before and JJ was 3x DPOY and almost won MVP in 2014. The city got fucked by Hurricane Harvey, so JJ Watt raised over $30 million even as the Texans season collapsed under injuries. Altuve was a symbol of hope when hundreds of thousands were still living in shelters, their homes destroyed. That’s what people forget.
2016 and 2015 were pretty stupid though, I agree. It shouldn’t be won more than once
How does a horse win “sportsman” of the year?
I realized this when I started seeing them post articles about South Carolina men’s basketball. I was like there’s no way a human being went through the pain of covering our games.
This is bottom of the barrel, totally devoid of ethics, and beyond shameful.
Dead Internet Theory coming to life.