Newspaper chain Gannett has paused the use of an artificial intelligence tool to write high school sports dispatches after the technology made several major flubs in articles in at least one of its papers. Several high school sports reports written by an AI service called LedeAI and published by the Columbus Dispatch earlier this month went viral on social media this week -- and not in a good way.
Curated from cnn.com · 31 August 2023 →
The reports read as what they were: no player names, the date repeated three times in as many paragraphs, the same phrases across every game, and a soccer result described as a close encounter of the athletic kind. One story, preserved in the Internet Archive, was published with the template placeholders still in it, naming the winning team's mascot as WINNING_TEAM_MASCOT. Gannett paused LedeAI across every market using it in August 2023. Local sport is exactly the sort of high-volume, low-margin copy this is aimed at, which is why it is worth noting what actually failed: not the writing, but that the pipeline had no step at which a person read the output before several thousand readers did.
