Let’s hope AI stays a facilitator, not an annihilator, of sports journalism

photo illustration created using chatgpt You’ve read here previously about the growing use of artificial intelligence to produce print/online news stories, but we need to also talk about its use in producing sports stories because, whoa, it’s so much more widespread in that area.This is happening for both valid and absurd reasons:Valid: Every geographic coverage area has teams in so many sports on so many levels (high school, college, minor/major professional) that staff writers can’t possibly cover them all.Valid: The numerical basis and discrete highlight moments of athletic competition easily allow automated construction of a game story using data such as box scores or transcripts.Valid: It’s cheaper and faster than a human. Absurd: Some corporate-level managers figure fans love their teams so much that any coverage of any quality is satisfactory.Despite that last point, the practice of AI-written sports stories can’t be discredited on the basis of how readers react to them. There…