As it announced last week, ESPN has begun posting to its website and app game and match summaries composed by generative AI. Like the recent article “Washington Spirit edge Portland Thorns…,” these summaries have a byline attributing them to ESPN Generative AI Services. The media company says that a human editor reviews every summary before its posting, “to ensure quality and accuracy.”
For now, the summaries are limited to the Premier Lacrosse League (PLL) and the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL), for neither of which ESPN has supplied such summaries before. Other sports – and, presumably, leagues – will follow.
The AI in question is Microsoft’s. ESPN, Disney, and Accenture control its training and prompts.
“The aim,” says ESPN, “is to learn, determine how to responsibly leverage new technology, and begin to establish best practices – all while augmenting our existing coverage of select sports,” while “allowing ESPN staff to focus on their more differentiating feature, analysis, investigative, and breaking news coverage.” During the network’s Media Day, on Aug. 28, the ESPN Chairman Jimmy Pitaro also spoke of developing a “personalized” version of the show SportsCenter – a project that Disney CEO Bob Iger has mentioned on an earnings call.
A third objective is to produce closed captions “at scale.”
ESPN hopes to introduce its DTC streaming service, Flagship, in the autumn of 2025.
Not everyone likes the idea
According to Front Office Sports (FOS), fans and reporters have complained on social media about the service, and a network spokesman has replied that generative AI has enabled ESPN to expand its coverage, for the first time, to “every PLL and NWSL match.”
But at least one summary appears to have misreported on a graphic the date of an NWSL game and the record of one of the teams competing. This was deleted and replaced.
FOS observes, in addition, that the Associated Press (AP) has been composing game summaries with generative AI for a while, because it “can free up our journalists to do more meaningful work.” For sports reporting, AP uses AI to “produce audio-to-text transcriptions, create shot lists in predictable environments, [and] tag content for search. However, AP has been auto-generating stories on corporate earnings for a decade, although always with a disclaimer, the spokesman said.
The sports blog Defector is also unhappy and takes the sportwriter’s view of the affair. ESPN’s public relations department, it writes, has “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.”
“The upshot,” Defector continues, “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.”
