ESPN’s AI-generated sports recaps are already missing the point

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge

This weekend, ESPN began publishing AI-generated recaps of women’s soccer games, with more sports to come. It’s using Microsoft AI to write each story, with humans only involved in reviewing each recap for “quality and accuracy.” ESPN says these stories will “augment,” rather than detract from, its other content — but needless to say, people have feelings about it.

It’s not that ESPN is masquerading AI work as that of humans. In fact, each story advertises that it’s written by “ESPN Generative AI Services,” and ESPN includes a note at the bottom of each article about how the recap is based on a transcript from the sporting event.

ESPN isn’t the only news organization that does this; The Associated Press started using AI to write sports recaps back in 2016, and both organizations pitch this as a way to cover more underserved sports. In addition to soccer, ESPN will also use it for lacrosse.

But so far, the stories are very bland, basic write-ups — and they’re already missing important nuance, as Parker Molloy points out. One of the National Women’s Soccer League stories failed to mention the significance of one player’s final game and the emotional moments that happened as a result, something ESPN waved at with a later update to the story.

ESPN argued that the AI summaries free up its writers to focus on more in-depth work like “more differentiating features, analysis, investigative, and breaking news coverage,” and in this instance, a human reporter did write an entire story about Alex Morgan’s emotional exit.

Columnist Tom Jones wrote for Poynter last week that despite ESPN’s justification that AI frees up journalists for more impactful work, there’s nothing stopping ESPN “from using AI to cover more and more other sports” down the line.

Jones points to Luis Paez-Pumar’s column for Defector, where he writes that ESPN is “feeding existing soccer and lacrosse journalists’ work into a machine aimed at making them obsolete” rather than hiring them to do this work.

ESPN says it does indeed plan to extend these AI recaps to more sports. Soccer and lacrosse are merely “its first experimentation with AI-generated content.”

Musicians, news organizations, and other creatives are fighting the rise of AI in court, arguing it trains on the work of humans without permission.