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.
