LAUSANNE, April 24, 2024 – Sports journalism is evolving rapidly, but what does the future hold for the profession in the age of artificial intelligence? A strong line-up of editors in chief from top sports newspapers alongside experts from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which in February organised the 2nd Global Forum on the Ethics of AI, will discuss this at the AIPS Centenary Congress in Santa Susanna, Spain on April 29.
FAKE NEWS Some newsrooms have already adopted AI for tasks such as writing match reports and editing video highlights. Generally, AI is increasingly revolutionising how sports is covered, but the big question remains: is it a solution or a threat? This was the focus of the IV/23 issue of the AIPS Magazine, in which the author of the cover story, Martin Mazur warned: “What’s really worrying, in the era of misinformation, is how AI can be the tool indirectly capable of destroying what was already written by actual journalists, not bloggers, not users, not content-creators, but real journalists.
“If, using AI, you can write and publish almost anything, the quantity of AI-generated content that will be published can be much larger than the ones written by humans. If other AIs, while searching for answers, find these texts written with mistakes by other robots, decide they are true and use the information to write or rewrite the course of events, that means that we will really be in the feared era of fake news.”
COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT In November 2023, Futurism reported that it discovered Sports Illustrated (SI) published several AI-generated articles written by fake, AI-generated authors. And in December 2023 the New York Times sued Open AI and Microsoft, the creators of ChatGPT and other popular AI platforms, for copyright infringement: “The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, contends that millions of articles published by The Times were used to train automated chatbots that now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information.”
THE FUTURE? AI definitely poses a challenge for sports journalism and the need to discuss the way forward cannot be overemphasised.
In the cover story of the IV/23 issue of the AIPS Magazine, Martin Mazur wrote: “When I asked Dall-E3, the image creator powered by OpenAI, what a newsroom could look like if AI had fully taken over and human journalism had become obsolete, the images it prompted were frightening: A nearly abandoned and dusty office, old PCs piled up, newspapers scattered on the floor and tall columns of wires from supercomputers dominating the scene. The aesthetics resembled the post-apocalypse photos of Chernobyl.”
That’s surely not a future to hope for.
