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The Future. American newspaper giant Gannett has rolled back its use of AI to write articles after they came out robotic, erroneous, and just plain bad. Coming on the heels of BuzzFeed going all-in on the use of AI to generate articles, US journalism may be sacrificing trust with readers just to boost SEO.
System malfunction
Gannett-owned papers like The Des Moines Register, The Columbus Dispatch, and Florida Today have been using Lede AI to write regional sports stories… and it’s been going terribly.
- Readers complained they were “lacking in detail, badly written, and read as if the writer had never watched the sport in question,” according to Insider.
- Case in point:
- Calling an Ohio football game a “close encounter of the athletic kind” (unintentionally hilarious).
- Writing the “The Worthington Christian [[WINNING_TEAM_MASCOT]] defeated the Westerville North [[LOSING_TEAM_MASCOT]]” (a total failure).
After getting mocked on social media, Gannett reversed course and “paused the high school sports Lede AI experiment” until it could meet its “highest journalistic standards” (read: not sound like a malfunctioning robot).
The stories were ultimately fixed with the correction that they’d “been updated to correct errors in coding, programming, or style.” That’s as equally hilarious as the AI-generated mistakes.
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