In the most recent edition of this newsletter, I said the rise of AI would mean “consumers are going to come to really appreciate an actual human voice and people in newsrooms finding out previously unknown information”. Given my predictions are usually terrible, I’m going to enjoy one bearing out soon after I wrote it.
Futurism’s Maggie Harrison revealed that Sports Illustrated published content from invented writers with AI-generated images and fake bios. It is not an unreasonable assumption that the questionable content was AI generated too. Sports Illustrated’s owner, The Arena Group, said it all came from a third party and it is investigating.
First things first. An AI bot could not do the kind of digging Harrison did for her story. The existence of both the AI content and the human-reported content proves the value of the latter. Harrison’s piece cites multiple (presumably human!) sources and likely came via a tip-off from someone, or at the very least journalistic instinct that something wasn’t right after reading the text/bios etc. Knowing who wrote information published under the banner of an illustrious outlet is important in and of itself. Doing the kind of diligent work clearly done for this story takes on even greater importance when dealing with more sensitive topics.
This Sports Illustrated mess is the latest one to come from publications using AI-generated content. There were errors and issues when CNET and its sister site Bankrate tried it too, for instance.
Every time this topic comes up I reiterate that I think AI tools are going to have some fantastic uses in journalism. They will, and already are, help to do difficult stories and data mine. They will also remove the need for journalists to do some boring work. Nick Thompson, CEO of the Atlantic, told WebSummit that AI will replace “basic reporting”. He cited sports reporting as one example:
“Obviously, machines can do sports scores, and probably a lot of sports reporting.”
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