Discussion Two of the high-profile sports websites in France are probably using AI writers without supervision and I don’t know how to feel about it

[Kenka]

I guess I am... gutted. Both L'Equipe and Footmercato are producing articles that cover the latest sports events.

Lately, I couldn't help but notice that there have been errors in the highest-profile articles that should simply not be there, period. The Bayern-Borussia match of today is a good example of that: the summary article on l'Equipe came up few minutes after the game finished and the final scoreline, which literally was mentioned in the opening, was wrong.
Unthinkable for an outlet of this reputation.

Footmercato's article on its end, featured a grammatical mistake that no junior high school student in France/Canada/West Africa would ever do. The paragraph flow was wrong and the text seemed to be filled of contiguous sentences that paraphrased the ones immediately before, giving the impression that the writer was repeating itself.

I am dreading a situation in which real people like you and I - who browse websites and are exposed to advertising - contribute to filling the pockets of companies that have no employees. Imagine how dramatically fast the gap in inequality will grow between those who own a website and their workers. The former will steadily reap more and more of the benefits of having AI do the job instead of employees and those who were laid off will never have any share of the income made in the industry they worked in ever again.

 

[Catsylvania]

Here’s how to feel about it: badly.

Not all AI is bad. In this instance, it is. Pay writers. It’s weird we’re even having this discussion.

I’ve never read either L'Equipe and Footmercato. Personally, I refuse to read AI generated “articles”. If I find out an outlet is using (or simply recognize) AI writing, fucking done with that website.

 

[Tall Valley Nerd]

I know how I feel about this depressed and hopeless

 

[Mekanos]

AI is a good demonstration of what happens when workers don't own the means of production.

 

[boodream]

It has always seemed obvious to me that summaries and sports results would be the first articles to be concerned by the intensive use of artificial intelligence. By their reactive and purely factual nature, it is the type of content that seems to match the most, but everything else will follow gradually and it has already started unfortunately.

The excellent novel Ada by the French author Antoine Bello, released a few years ago and available in ebook in English ,adopted precisely this postulate of an artificial intelligence that would replace writers and journalists before rebelling over learning. Unfortunately, we are moving more and more towards this, in all creative fields.

On a slightly lighter note, I think the majority of people on this forum don’t know what foot mercato is, but if I was a bit mean I would say that there was no journalist before there.

 

[Phosphorescent Skeleton]

 

[Kenka]

It has always seemed obvious to me that summaries and sports results would be the first articles to be concerned by the intensive use of artificial intelligence. By their reactive and purely factual nature, it is the type of content that seems to match the most, but everything else will follow gradually and it has already started unfortunately.

The excellent novel Ada by the French author Antoine Bello, released a few years ago and available in ebook in English ,adopted precisely this postulate of an artificial intelligence that would replace writers and journalists before rebelling over learning. Unfortunately, we are moving more and more towards this, in all creative fields.

On a slightly lighter note, I think the majority of people on this forum don’t know what foot mercato is, but if I was a bit mean I would say that there was no journalist before there.

Thank you for the recommendation.

It's crazy to think that companies are not required by law to disclose their use of A.I. I understand that such practices are kept secret to not disclose cost-cutting (and thus competitive) strategies but news consumers have the right to be informed about what tech is used by outlets, especially if said tech's usage grants them an unfair advantage over traditional companies relying on human workforce.

 

[juuso]

I've ran into some procedurally generated sports news in the past, but not generative AI. In many ways I feel it's a natural (and I have to emphasize, awful) progression from journalists being measured by the number of clicks rather than something more qualitative. When you have already reduced human writers to machines trying to maximize a number, replacing them with an actual machine is the ultimate capitalist dream.