On Thursday, ESPN announced that it will expand its coverage of the National Women's Soccer League and the Premier Lacrosse League, a move meant to "enhance coverage of underserved sports." While nothing a company like ESPN does is purely driven by altruistic motives, this is an overdue course correction from the most influential entity in sports journalism. Hiring more journalists to cover women's soccer and men's lacrosse is a big win for the sports and for readers, and ESPN should reap the benefits of increased reporting by—oh no oh god it's yet another bullshit AI pivot.
Read that quote in the first paragraph again: ESPN wants to "enhance coverage of underserved sports," but will not pay real human beings to do this. Instead, it will "leverage Microsoft AI technology" to autogenerate game recaps. But don't worry, a human editor will be on hand to check each recap for "quality and accuracy," because at least the brass at ESPN knows the slop AI is best known for producing. As an example: In the original tweet from ESPN Front Row, the AI-generated recap meant to showcase the feature got the Washington Spirit's record wrong. The company deleted the tweet and reposted it with a different blurb.
In the press release announcing the move, ESPN's PR arm used a lot of words that don't mean anything to mask the fact that it's yet another media company gleefully embracing the prospect of not paying journalists. Take this gobbledygook of a sentence: "This innovation project was incubated through the ESPN Edge Innovation Center as an initiative that reflects ESPN’s commitment to embracing emerging technologies to drive innovation as a purposeful, responsible experimentation with AI technology." Innovation, incubated, initiative, emerging technologies: all of those techy buzzwords that in essence only attempt to obfuscate that ESPN executives see cash in AI, and so AI is coming to ESPN.
Though the press release says the AI slop will allow "ESPN staff to focus on their more differentiating feature, analysis, investigative, and breaking news coverage," if I worked at ESPN I certainly would be worried about how far this AI incursion will end up going. 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!
Interesting to note also is that ESPN is touting that the AI has undergone a training process, but on what? By ESPN's own admission, the site does not provide NWSL or PLL recaps, which means that this AI will either be trained on other sports' recaps (which will surely lead to errors in terminology and the general sense that the article's author isn't someone who actually knows the sport) or, more ghoulishly, on NWSL and PLL gamers from other websites.
If it's the latter, then that makes an already cynical pivot, presented in benevolent language, even more insidious. The upshot would be that ESPN is beefing up its coverage of "underserved" sports (and who, pray tell, is responsible for this underserving?) not by hiring people who can and already do write these kinds of stories, but rather by feeding existing soccer and lacrosse journalists' work into a machine aimed at making them obsolete. Or, at least, it will try to make them obsolete; nothing about AI's recent history points to this being successful in any way except fattening the wallets of AI's self-interested investor-evangelists.
Despite this looking like a terrible idea from the start, ESPN is plowing ahead as of now. The AI-written, human-edited recaps will begin this weekend for both the NWSL and the PLL.
