{"id":4538,"date":"2023-08-29T23:03:19","date_gmt":"2023-08-29T23:03:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.godefy.com\/usa-today-owner-pauses-ai-articles-after-butchering-sports-coverage"},"modified":"2023-08-29T23:03:19","modified_gmt":"2023-08-29T23:03:19","slug":"usa-today-owner-pauses-ai-articles-after-butchering-sports-coverage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.godefy.com\/usa-today-owner-pauses-ai-articles-after-butchering-sports-coverage\/","title":{"rendered":"USA Today Owner Pauses AI Articles After Butchering Sports Coverage"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Fumble That was fast. The Columbus Dispatch, a newspaper serving the Columbus, Ohio area, has suspended its AI efforts after its AI-powered sports writing bot was caught churning out horrible, robotic articles about local sports, Axios reports. The Dispatch \u2014 which is notably owned by USA Today publisher Gannett \u2014 only started publishing the AI-generated sports pieces on August 18, using the bot to drum up quick-hit stories about the winners and losers in regional high school football and soccer matches. And though the paper&#8217;s ethics disclosure states that all AI-spun content featured in its reporting &#8220;must be verified for accuracy and factuality before being used in reporting,&#8221; we&#8217;d be surprised if a single human eye was laid on these articles before publishing. Why? Because each formulaic article is riddled with laughably vague statements \u2014 one August 18 article about a football game, for example, described the event as a &#8220;close encounter of the athletic kind&#8221; \u2014 and repetitive phrasing about hibernating second halves and which team drew first blood. One article even failed to populate properly, with the text instead featuring a bracketed glimpse at how its opening sentence was supposed\u00a0to read. &#8220;The Worthington Christian [[WINNING_TEAM_MASCOT]] defeated the Westerville North [[LOSING_TEAM_MASCOT]] 2-1 in an Ohio boys soccer game on Saturday,&#8221; reads the butchered intro. Yikes. Short and Sweet The Dispatch&#8217;s AI efforts\u00a0were powered by LedeAI, a startup claiming to use generative AI to offer &#8220;lightning-fast&#8221; and &#8220;easy to read&#8221; sports content. (The firm also goes so far as to&#8230;<a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/the-byte\/usa-today-owner-ai-articles-sports\">USA Today Owner Pauses AI Articles After Butchering Sports Coverage<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Fumble That was fast. The Columbus Dispatch, a newspaper serving the Columbus, Ohio area, has suspended its AI efforts after its AI-powered sports writing bot was caught churning out horrible,&hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[821,62,300,4253,481,3206,3475,4255,12,2674,4254,295],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godefy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4538"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godefy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godefy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godefy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godefy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4538"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.godefy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4538\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godefy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godefy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godefy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}