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Comment by xrd | Hacker News Reader

For years, ESPN has put machine generated predictions of upcoming games.

https://www.espn.com/nba/preview/_/gameId/401584885

"The Associated Press created this story using technology provided by Data Skrive and data from Sportradar."

Example paragraph:

"The two teams match up for the second time this season. The Nuggets defeated the Clippers 111-108 in their last meeting on Nov. 15. Jokic led the Nuggets with 32 points, and Paul George led the Clippers with 35 points."

100% generated from the stats table, and totally boring and devoid of life. Horrible.

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Yahoo fantasy football does this with each weekly head to head matchup. They're clearly labeled as machine generated ("Powered by ChatGPT API") and add a little fun.

I've long thought that would be a nice use case for the game of Diplomacy. End of round recaps by a "witty" chatbot.

I've these summary articles for sports and stocks.The article quality is so low that it's mostly useless information.

Who even reads these articles? Does anyone get benefits?

The reason is people will click on them thinking it is an interesting story. The publisher (ESPN/Yahoo/etc.) just care that you click on the page so the ads load and they get the impressions. Some PM probably ran some analysis that machine generated articles from a stats table will get X number of clicks which will generate Y dollars in ad revenue. There was likely no consideration that the overall content of the site would decrease. After awhile people stop clicking on them because they know it will be a machine generated article so eventually the publisher will stop putting them on their website.

I think the industry term for this is "made for advertising content".

The PM or whosever's idea it was: "we don't do long-term experiments so nobody can prove it is ultimately destructive and imma be outa here next year anyway".

at least they admit it:

The Associated Press created this story using technology provided by Data Skrive and data from Sportradar.

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