Popular sports broadcasting network ESPN announced that starting Friday, Sept. 6, Artificial Intelligence will be used to cover game recaps for under-served sports. These sports include the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) and the Premier Lacrosse League (PLL). NWSL and PLL were not regularly reported by ESPN prior to the inclusion of AI, an initiative that is said to extend to other sports in the future.
According to ESPN’s announcement, the AI-generated recaps aim to “enhance coverage of under-served sports, providing fans with content that was previously unavailable.”
We feel ESPN’s explanation has some gaping holes. If the goal was to enhance coverage of sports that don’t receive as much attention, why lean to AI to achieve this when assigning more journalists should be the solution? As college students soon to enter the professional field, coverage of underrepresented sports competitions sounds like the perfect internship opportunity or entry-level position.
Deciding to side with AI over hiring more journalists or reporters adds fuel to the fire of writers’ already existing anxiety when it comes to AI. Many writers, including us, fear that journalistic writing will eventually become undervalued and obsolete with AI generated text. An unfortunate foundation of this fear stems from many businesses and companies jumping at the opportunity to save money time and time again.
“If I worked at ESPN I certainly would be worried about how far this AI incursion will end up going,” said Luis Paez-Pumar, a writer for the Defector. “The press release itself is ominous, saying that the goal is to ‘learn, determine how to responsibly leverage new technology, and begin to establish best practices.’ That sure doesn’t sound like something that will be limited to game recaps once it’s up and running.”
To make matters worse, it is extremely unfortunate that the NWSL and women’s sports’ yet again will fall victim to less resources allocated and less attention overall. Imagine how professional athletes of underrepresented sports will feel when they learn ESPN, arguably the biggest name in sports reporting, didn’t bother to send a human journalist to their tournament. We, as a team, would be offended.
We feel strongly that no matter the inclusion of generative text, AI will never replace the importance of humanity in storytelling. As writers ourselves, a sense of voice and authenticity is important to readers. Readers want to engage with content that is not only entertaining, but feels relatable to them. This is much more difficult to achieve when using generative artificial intelligence. There is no way that artificial intelligence can experience the excitement of a tie-breaking moment in a game, and convey that to text in a way that is as authentic as a human being who was present to experience it.
According to Forbes, “AI may miss subtle nuances in language, tone and context that could make a significant difference to the reader’s perception.”
This is expected to be especially prevalent in sports writing. We feel AI is just not able to capture the experience or the thrill of a competitive game in the same way that a sports journalist can. On top of that, ESPN using AI could cause recaps to fall short of a game’s accurate description. Without a writer experiencing a game firsthand, we feel writing can’t possibly summarize sports authentically.
Instead of using AI to create content, generative text could be used as a tool for brainstorming in journalism. The technology can generate a range of ideas that could help plan stories and provide an article with a structure from its beginning stages. Using AI to brainstorm allows a place for the technology in writing as a helpful tool without losing that touch of humanity that keeps readers engaged.
