• by Ray Schultz , August 31, 2023

Gannett has halted an effort to insert artificial intelligence into its journalism following a mortifying glitch in the The Columbus Dispatch, according to reports. 

That paper’s high school sports section featured writeups authored by Lede AI, which uses game scores to generate sports recaps. 

The embarrassing, AI-written lines, which were widely ridiculed in social media, included:  

• “A close encounter of the athletic kind."  
• “The Pilots avoided the brakes and shifted into victory gear." 
• A scoreboard was “in hibernation until the fourth quarter."

Readers have probably seen worse prose from live reporters at times. But Gannett has halted the experiment, and has posted a notice saying it was correcting coding and style errors. And it has stopped working with Lede AI. 

Sadly, high school journalists-in-training could be recruited to supply excellent sports coverage for little or no cost. But Gannett clearly saw this as a chance to try out a process that could later be applied more widely.