A (Not So) Grand Experiment

By Gordon Hopkins So, imagine that your house is on fire. What is your first response? By any chance, is it to think to yourself, “Fight fire with fire,” and then turn on the stove?Apparently, that is what newspaper giant Gannett was thinking when they decided to have an AI (Artificial Intelligence) program write sports.Well, I suppose it's cheaper than hiring Red Smith. (Not knowing any sport writers, I went to Google and typed “famous sport writers.” Red Smith was the first name that popped up.) Plus, Red Smith is dead.The Gannett company owns more than 100 daily newspapers, and nearly 1,000 weekly newspapers, publishing in 44 states, one U.S. territory, and six countries.Yes, newspapers are hurting financially. Yes, newspapers across the country are cutting staff in an attempt to cut expenses. No, the solution is not to use AI to replace flesh-and-blood journalists.By way of explanation for this asinine stunt, a Gannett spokesperson issued a statement that said, in part, “In addition to adding hundreds of reporting jobs across the country, we are experimenting with automation and AI to build tools for our journalists and add content for our readers.”That's a bit like saying, “We've improved our diet plan by adding an unlimited ice cream bar.”This ‘experiment’ was far from a success. Obviously, otherwise we probably wouldn't know about it. This is suppose to be the great thing about AI. When it works they way it is supposed to, you can't tell the difference between a robot and a human.Now, the sports stories written by AI perhaps could have been written by a human, assuming that human was a complete idiot who didn't understand sports at all and wrote at a kindergarten level.Aside from the factual inaccuracies, there was repetition and amateurish phrasing.In one story, the AI did not have the names of the teams' mascots. Instead of just not metnioning the mascots or referring to them as 'mascots,” like a human would have done, the AI wrote, “The Worthington Christian [[WINNING_TEAM_MASCOT]] defeated the Westerville North [[LOSING_TEAM_MASCOT]] 2-1 in an Ohio boys soccer game on Saturday.”What I find most disturbing about these stories are the awkward attempts at what I am guessing is supposed to be humor, like, “close encounter of the athletic kind.”Leave the comedy to the humans, R2-D2.The company that created Red Smith 2.0 is LedeAI. That company's CEO, Jay Allred, apologized for the errors, “As with any new technological advance, some glitches can occur.”A Gannett spokesperson said, “We have paused the high school sports LedeAI experiment and will continue to evaluate vendors as we refine processes to ensure all the news and information we provide meets the highest journalistic standards.”Note the important word in that sentence: “paused.” Not “stopped.” Not “given up.” Not “Realized the error of our ways.” Gannett makes very clear that, once the “glitches” are sorted out, they will start up again with this self-destructive insanity.Let me be blunt. AI is probably the biggest threat to the news industry since the first days of the internet, when that very first teenager sat at a home computer that cost more than my car, and was probably just about as big, posting to the very first online bulletin board and thought to himself, “Hey, I can just lie and no one will know.”We live in a time when news is assaulted on multiple fronts: the corrupt politicians and pundits attempting to discredit real news, plus the never-ending deluge of lies that drowns out real, factual information that people really need to know, but can't be sure is true.AI is not the solution. AI is the enemy.Getting into bed with AI is like getting to bed with a shark with a crocodile strapped to its back.Any comfort is going to be short-lived indeed.There is one saving grace to this ‘experiment.’ It shows how unbelievably stupid it is to count on AI to publish news. Unfortunately, it also shows just how unbelievably stupid some of the people who publish news can be.

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