The uncanny valley of sports journalism
The cursed combination of AI, legal and accessible gambling, and Gannett
This post is about how Gannett is using AI to create a webpage dedicated to sports betting.
If that’s not a cursed sentence, I don’t know what is.
A few weeks ago, I had a lovely conversation with Maggie Harrison Dupré from Futurism for a story she did about how USA Today has a daily story on its website, written by automated technology, that lists that night’s Major League Baseball games with links to how to watch each one. The page also features several ads for online sports books, from which readers can make bets on the games listed above and from which Gannett will get a cut.
The story is excellent, and you can and should read the whole thing here. I’ve never been more accurately pegged in any piece of media than Maggie did with this sentence: At one point in our conversation, when considering how to summarize his thoughts and feelings about Gannett's automated betting referrals, he simply let out an audible groan.
Preparing for our interview and reading the final story got me thinking about the USA page and why it bothered me so much, why it felt so off-putting. This post is a riff on those ideas.
Why is this a big deal?
Is it because it’s about gambling? In some ways, yeah. This is a page that’s clearly designed to cater to those interested in betting on tonight’s baseball games. But so what? Gambling is widely legal and accessible, and it’s certainly more accepted these days. There’s an audience for people who want sports gambling information, and what media company would ignore what a segment of its audience wants — especially in this day and age?
Is it because it was written by AI? In some ways, yeah. It’s always jarring to see something in a newspaper that was written not by a human but by a computer. But so what? AI/automated technology1 has been around the sports media space for the better part of a decade. Of all the uses for AI in media, a page that creates a simple list of tonight’s baseball games is a pretty good one. It’s the kind of item that can easily be automated.
Is all of this ethical? In a lot of ways, this is an extremely ethically put together page. The fact that AI/automated technology was used in generating the page’s content is clearly disclosed, as is the fact that Gannett gets a referral on bets placed through the ads. There is also a long disclaimer about potential trouble with sports gambling — Harrison Dupré beautifully points out that the disclaimers below the article are twice as long as the article itself. But the disclaimers are there and clear. The sports book links are clearly advertisements — they look and act differently than the rest of the page.
By the letter of journalist ethics, this page is fine.
So really, why does it feel so icky?
At first glance it looks like any other article written on any other news site. But the longer you look at it, the more off it seems.
The byline makes it seem normal. But the presence of a byline is a journalistic cue that means something. It means that what you are about to read was written by the person listed. Here, that’s not the case. It’s an editor who reviewed the AI/automated text. Yay for someone reviewing the AI generated text that it, but giving them a byline makes you think they wrote it when a computer program wrote it. It’s a little thing, but it adds up.
The links for the sports books are clearly ads. But their presence is disorienting. They bog down the page. Also, come to think of it, the headline for this “story” is “MLB games today: Schedule, times, how to watch for May 28” or whatever the date is. From the headline, there is nothing that indicates this is a page at least partially designed to help you bet on tonight’s games.
And then you think who’s this page for? Yes, there’s an audience for sports gambling. But if you are interested in betting on the Pirates-Guardians game, you more likely than not already have an account with a sports book. You don’t need an ad in the middle of a website sending you there.
It all just seems a little bit off. It’s uncanny valley journalism. It looks just enough like a news story and acts just enough like a news story and follows the traditional ethics and practices of a news story just enough to make you think it’s OK.
There’s nothing wrong with what USA Today is doing here. But there’s nothing right about it either.
A lot of the things I’ve written about and talked about in this space is about the potential for scandal in sports journalism and sports gambling. The potential for insider trading. The complicity in normalizing unhealthy behaviors. The coverage focused on individual actors and not larger systems.
But this page is indicative of something more pernicious long term. The big picture fear a lot of us have is that legal and accessible gambling is going to lead to a slow decline in sports journalism. Seeing a measurable audience that is motivated to click, editors and executives will be drawn to this type of coverage at the expense of the meaningful and mundane stories that make a sports section so essential to journalism and to a community.
The fear is that the soul of sports journalism is being lost for, as I said in this interview, a “naked cash grab.”
And THEN you add AI on top of this, replacing reporters with a script that does the work for us, and it’s truly a cursed story.
In the Futurism story, Gannett said that it did not use AI but relied on automated technology to create the story. I’m sure there is a difference, but functionally, there’s not. I leave them both in here because pointing out that “distinction” is funny to me.