An advertisement on the careers site LinkedIn, in December, called for applicants to help evaluate the effectiveness of artificial intelligence in generating sports journalism, shows the new challenges faced by journalists in the “AI boom”.
The ad, placed by Mercor, which describes itself as “a revolutionary AI hiring platform”, targets journalists with experience in sports media.
The job entails assessing AI generated sports journalism across a range of sports and metrics, including “tactical analyses, sports knowledge, player understanding and situational awareness”.
Successful applicants will be required to “collaborate with analysts and developers to enhance the Al’s accuracy and authenticity in sports coverage”.
10News national affairs editor Hugh Rimington, said on X: “Here’s how it’s done. A LinkedIn job for a sports reporter to analyse AI sports commentary, to improve it, so that sports commentators are put out of a job.”
Because AI language models work by predicting the most likely examples of language use from large samples, they are prone to factual error, and to invention, referred to in the field as “hallucinations”.
According to researcher Patrick Lewis, these models are improving over time, with issues of accuracy and hallucination being addressed through the use of “research augmented generation”.
This allows the model to search subject-specific databases, instead of relying on its initial knowledge set.
“You’re rewarding it, in the way that you train the model, to try to write something where every factual claim can be attributed back to a source,” Lewis said.
The Mercor job would involve sports journalists helping researchers improve these AI models by “identifying factual inaccuracies, tactical misinterpretations, or tone/style mismatches in AI analyses”.
Matt Dunn, Gippsland-based sports journalist and podcaster, said: “AI is shaping up as one of the big disruptors to journalism.”
But, he said, AI is still not capable of “nuanced” reporting. “We’re not just writing scores — you are still going to have to have journalists on the ground, making human connections, human commentary.”
AI chatbot ChatGPT agrees. When asked whether AI can replace sports journalists, it said: “AI can summarise a match. It can’t replace the social function of journalism: asking uncomfortable questions, building trust with players, noticing the mood of a locker room or understanding the politics inside a club. Those things aren’t datasets.
“I can’t replace curiosity, courage or presence.”
According to Geelong Advertiser sports journalist Ben Cameron, NewsCorp is already using AI to generate headline suggestions.
The Guardian reported in 2023 that NewsCorp was using AI to produce 3000 news stories for its local papers.
It has developed an in-house AI tool called “NewsGPT” which can generate articles, adopt various styles and even take on the persona of another writer. It is also developing an AI tool called “Story Cutter”, which would edit articles.
These tools are designed to cut staff and reduce NewsCorps wages costs.
Journalists are also facing job insecurity, lower pay and job cuts, particularly in regional areas. Restructures, redundancies and closures have led to hundreds of job cuts in the past few years.
The Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance (MEAA) found in 2021 that the number of working journalists in Australia had fallen from roughly 15,000 to less than 10,000 people, between 2011–2021.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, last year there were only 8469 journalists in Australia.
The MEAA has expressed concern with AI being used to “steal the work of Australia’s artists, journalists and creative workers”.
Journalists have raised concerns about the impact of generative AI in newsrooms on their ability to comply with the MEAA Journalist Code of Ethics. These include banning plagiarism, attributing sources and striving for “accuracy, fairness and disclosure of all essential facts”.
Rob Curtain, an Associate Teaching Fellow at Deakin University’s School of Communication, said “an AI search may be of interest to include in a news story”, but it does not qualify as journalism.
Freelance writer Cassey Polimeni told the ABC she has noticed a significant decrease in freelance roles since the emergence of AI. She said “80%of the roles that were coming back … were [for] correcting mistakes made by [AI] language models.”
The ABC reported that 40% of small and medium business are using AI, and that 84% of office workers are using AI in their work.
As capitalists invest in data centres, which consume huge amounts of energy and water, and other AI infrastructure, more jobs are likely to be at risk as corporations seek savings on wages.