Well, previously you needed an intern working maybe an hour (of they actually wrote good content, obviously more), that intern needs food, air conditioning / heating, so I'm not sure which consumes less energy. Now you have it in a minute and for a predictable low fee.
There are basically two types of content when it comes to these sports recap articles. I'm also excluding opinions/editorials because those are completely different.
1. low profile, not-so-popular content. eg. A Canadian Football League preseason game between the Toronto Argonauts and BC Lions
This was still generated using a template. No human intervention except maybe double-checking it before publishing it. This was before AI, too.
Often it was there for SEO or just updating people via a headline
2. High profile content, eg. Jeremy Lin puts up 38 pts in a game
This is often one of:
- pre-written, especially if we expected to happen that day
- withheld from publishing if there was auto-generated content but something crazy happened that game and then quickly re-written and released. Usually this would still at least be pre-written before the game ended and details that needed to wait for the game to end were filled in seconds before/after the game ended.
There's just as much labour put into it now as before. AI is now generating the low profile template instead of the madlibs we did before. The value add is that it's probably a better read, so you actually get user engagement, and better SEO than before.
And this same issue highlighted in the OP article would also happen without AI.
> This was still generated using a template. No human intervention except maybe double-checking it before publishing it. This was before AI, too.
Odd question but is that why the banal reporting on so many websites is such utter shit? Like in all dimensions, it gets facts wrong, it's usually rife with spelling and grammatical errors... when I spend too much time online I start feeling like the sole person on the planet who gives a shit about writing correctly.
Low quality news sites usually have a target that they need to reach in the form of X articles per day. When you're in that position, at best you can spend a couple of hours on any individual story before you have to turn your attention to the next one.
Good news take time and journalists often don't have that luxury.
Probably money in, money out. I think the content you're looking at _is_ underpaid interns. As another comment mention, sports data is actually very structured these days and its easy to automatically generate articles with it. Actual news, probably not so much.
The efficiency gains are undeniable, and AI can scale in ways that were unimaginable before. Less grunt work, more room for innovation—hopefully, we can reinvest that time and energy wisely.
