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Comment on USA Today Owner Pauses AI Articles After Butchering Sports Coverage

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Where does the data on the sports event come from? There must be other articles already written about it for the AI to attempt to reproduce, right?

Why wouldn’t they just use those original articles? Or are these made up whole cloth and a CEO thought AI just magically knows what happens on high school football fields?

They start with raw data collected at the event itself. A lot of games have statisticians who collect not just the scores but gather data on every play/at-bat/etc. Even high school games have those; it's often the official job of some student.

That does have enough information to make an article. In the early days of baseball, a radio announcer could receive the stats continuously and narrate the game, with a bit of imagination.

Some of the examples look as if they got nothing more than the box scores, and used AI hallucination on other sports articles to generate a bunch of generic verbiage out of that. (To me, as a non sports fan, that's what most sports writing looks like anyway. I have no idea why people want to read that, but there is a market for it.)

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