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Comment by skipants | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty funny to me that this is used as a hit-piece against AI generated content. Here's an open-secret for everyone: web-based sports content companies have been automatically generating content articles for at least a decade; way before LLMs became popular.

It is and was mostly done for search ranking. The more seemingly applicable content, the better your SEO.

This situation has probably happened several times before AI but has gone unnoticed or noticed to little fanfare. It's more indicative of ESPN not having its finger to the pulse and ensuring that one of the copywriters manually updated this particular article. It's not too surprising to me. They've always been known to favour quantity over quality.

source: I worked as a developer on the tech side of a company with this kind of content

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Well AI certainly didn't make it better in this case.

The fact that it is profitable to make this generic sports-lingo-laced content is, on its own, pretty depressing.

the depression shouldn't arise from the generation, but from the consumption, for it is the latter that ultimately drives the former; that, in turn, can generate a reflection on what I myself consume.

I don't think people do actually consume it. In my experience this content was purely for SEO or maybe just a headline that people read quickly to keep up-to-date. The actual article content is rarely seen by a human.

that's a form of consumption

So is tuberculosis but it's not what people mean when they use the word

I see SEO as a make work project to support Wall Street valuations. We have SEO content being consumed by content indexing bots for traffic.

> I see SEO as a make work project to support Wall Street valuations.

You're missing the whole middle part about users and revenue. SEO alone does not a Wall Street valuation make.

Maybe the indictment here should instead be about discovery and how we share ideas and utility with one another.

I think discovery by word of mouth is a much better than SEO. I also believe that just because money is changing hands doesn’t indicate productivity.

> You're missing the whole middle part about users and revenue. SEO alone does not a Wall Street valuation make.

Are they? Or are you over-estimating that part?

> Are they?

Do you have an example of a company whose valuation is driven principally by eyeballs? Not metrics tied to eyeballs, e.g. ad revenue. Just eyeballs.

Ad revenue is part of hot potato game. The participants pick a metric and take sides arguing valuation while passing revenue.

> participants pick a metric and take sides arguing valuation while passing revenue

Do you have an example where the metric is eyeballs?

This was a thing once! But to my knowledge, it isn't the sole basis of any company's valuation today.

It’s just one more place to stick an ad.

isn't the point of seo to get in front of consumers?

The point is to use filler content to trick bots…

So people will see content ESPN is actually paying meaningful amounts of money to create ie videos.

Yes, but not for these articles. Here's a example situation where having good SEO with filler content that makes sense: Lebron James retires.

If you are faster and have the best SEO at that point in time then that means everyone trying to read about Lebron James retiring is going to search it in Google and is going to read your article first, and you're getting the ad revenue. It's a 90/10 situation. The "top" website in the rankings is going to get 90% of the clicks.

You can only be the "top" if your SEO to that point is also the "best". And to have that you need to have all this generated content.

But sports reporting has pretty much always been this way.

Unless anything extraordinary happens, every post game interview features the same questions with the same answers and every article about the game looks the same with only the names of the participating players and their stats changing.

So you're are telling me AI is as bad as the previous method, with more data and higher energy consumption?

Well, previously you needed an intern working maybe an hour (of they actually wrote good content, obviously more), that intern needs food, air conditioning / heating, so I'm not sure which consumes less energy. Now you have it in a minute and for a predictable low fee.

And that intern still needs good, and air conditioning/heating, but now can’t pay for them. Still, at least the share values are up a little.

The efficiency gains are undeniable, and AI can scale in ways that were unimaginable before. Less grunt work, more room for innovation—hopefully, we can reinvest that time and energy wisely.

Did they need an intern?

Doesn't sound so.

>web-based sports content companies have been automatically generating content articles for at least a decade

It was template-based. The templates were written by humans. The computers filled in the blanks in the templates and combined templates together.

That's not quite how it worked.

There are basically two types of content when it comes to these sports recap articles. I'm also excluding opinions/editorials because those are completely different.

1. low profile, not-so-popular content. eg. A Canadian Football League preseason game between the Toronto Argonauts and BC Lions

This was still generated using a template. No human intervention except maybe double-checking it before publishing it. This was before AI, too.

Often it was there for SEO or just updating people via a headline

2. High profile content, eg. Jeremy Lin puts up 38 pts in a game

This is often one of:

- pre-written, especially if we expected to happen that day - withheld from publishing if there was auto-generated content but something crazy happened that game and then quickly re-written and released. Usually this would still at least be pre-written before the game ended and details that needed to wait for the game to end were filled in seconds before/after the game ended.

There's just as much labour put into it now as before. AI is now generating the low profile template instead of the madlibs we did before. The value add is that it's probably a better read, so you actually get user engagement, and better SEO than before.

And this same issue highlighted in the OP article would also happen without AI.

> This was still generated using a template. No human intervention except maybe double-checking it before publishing it. This was before AI, too.

Odd question but is that why the banal reporting on so many websites is such utter shit? Like in all dimensions, it gets facts wrong, it's usually rife with spelling and grammatical errors... when I spend too much time online I start feeling like the sole person on the planet who gives a shit about writing correctly.

Probably money in, money out. I think the content you're looking at _is_ underpaid interns. As another comment mention, sports data is actually very structured these days and its easy to automatically generate articles with it. Actual news, probably not so much.

Low quality news sites usually have a target that they need to reach in the form of X articles per day. When you're in that position, at best you can spend a couple of hours on any individual story before you have to turn your attention to the next one.

Good news take time and journalists often don't have that luxury.

The intern already exists and consumes those things, though.

> ensuring that one of the copywriters manually updated this particular article.

Clearly it was never "there" yet though previously, and obviously still isn't when this article is what's generated. You can tell that a lot of sports articles are essentially "fill in the blank", which is why they get the AP stories up right away, and then have their actual beat reporters come out with something later that night, or early next morning.

Pretty much. Though there were a lot of articles that are never touched, based on popularity.

Beat reporters will also write during the game, and if I’m remembering correctly, will work on differing versions of the ultimate winner at the same time.

ESPN has been in decline since longer than LLMs have been around. More explicit use of AI is just accelerating the downward spiral.

Absolutely correct! In the old days it was mostly video replay and witty banter describing what you were watching, which was fun to watch. Now it's become something I couldn't care less about, which is less video and someone telling me what I should think about what I just watched.

I'm OK with didactic commentators if the person talking to me is an expert and giving me new information.

Broadcast media outlets fail at that. I don't know much about sports but even I can tell that people on TV are speaking in vague generalities so they can never be proven wrong. I get told that the team that lost "didn't want to win" as if people getting paid millions a year to win at sports aren't motivated.

When people are afraid of being proven wrong above all else, they avoid making any substantive claims. If someone isn't afraid of that, they'll make more interesting predictions I can't get elsewhere, and eventually it'll be a more enjoyable product because I can make fun of that person for being wrong.

I can't help but wonder if gambling isn't part of the reason for all the opinions these commentators are having. You're right, expert info is important.

If I was into online sports betting, I would want all the info I could get. Since I'm not, what I want is video replay of what I missed, that's where ESPN lost me.

What web have you been browsing in the past 5+ years? It's not only sports "content". Any kind of content is drowned into low quality SEO pages. Auto generated or not, it's as useless. LLMs just generate it cheaper.

What a weird and rude way to call this out. The parent wasn’t talking about non-sports content and never suggested that sports writing was the only type of content plagued by SEO spam.

to me it doesn't appear particularly against or in favour of. Seemingly, LLMs don't avoid completely some of the mistakes that were already being made. Just as with any technology, the questions should be: by how much the two errors differ? Does the cost justify this margin?

Maybe hit-piece was a strong word; but I do think it's saying this happened _because_ of AI when to me it's been an issue for a long time. ESPN was always pretty egregious when it came to penny-pinching on content and ignoring less popular sports. Ask ice hockey fans how they feel about ESPN.

> has gone unnoticed or noticed to little fanfare

To be fair, I don't think it's gone unnoticed at all

Not by people in the know, no. But I'd say 80% of "normal" people reading sports websites probably had no idea until now, and the only difference is that (gen)AI is suddenly a "feature" to be boasted about to customers to make shareholders happy. And suddenly all of these normal people are starting to have opinions on it.

Much like when food ingredients are slowly made worse over time, consumers can't necessarily put their finger on how and why somethinng is worse, but they tend to notice that it's worse.

I think people have noticed if not explicitly. They end up going toward platforms that have real humans on them (social media, message boards, substack) and not really understanding it's because they read a bunch of algorithmically generated noise on "traditional" published websites and moved on.

I don't think people did notice. Our view counts for sports articles were always very low, except the very high profile articles. And those ones would always be done by a copywriter and properly edited.

What makes this article a hit piece actually? Seems like straightforward reporting on facts.

Those articles were awful and at least some were noticeable

You're missing the entire point. LLMs are super overhyped and this is the 9000th example of how garbage LLM generated "content" is. It doesn't matter that garbage was being generated before. If LLMs were only being sold as "it might be better than the spam generator you're using today" we wouldn't have the current bubble where people are losing their jobs because C-suite clowns believe the hype.

If they were overhyped people would not actually lose their jobs

Uhhh yes they would and absolutely are. C-suite level people are falling for the hype and banking on productivity gains that won't be realized.

> It's pretty funny to me that this is used as a hit-piece against AI generated content.

Is it though? My takeaway was that they lament the terrible "journalistic" standards that ESPN embraces.

Not to blow your bubble but uh, yes, everyone is aware, they were garbage then, too.

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