Gannett pauses AI-generated high school sports articles after mockery
Recaps from the vendor LedeAI, published by Gannett's Columbus Dispatch and other local papers, included unfilled placeholder text such as '[[WINNING_TEAM_MASCOT]]'.
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Gannett, publisher of USA Today and hundreds of local newspapers, paused its use of an automated sports-writing tool after AI-generated high school sports recaps went viral for their errors. The tool, built by vendor LedeAI and deployed at papers including the Columbus Dispatch, had been auto-generating short game recaps from box-score data since earlier that August.
Screenshots circulated on social media showing stories with robotic phrasing, missing player names, and — in the most widely shared example — unfilled template placeholders left in published text, including a soccer recap that began “The Worthington Christian [[WINNING_TEAM_MASCOT]] defeated the Westerville North [[LOSING_TEAM_MASCOT]] 2-1.” The errors suggested minimal or no human review before publication, despite the recaps carrying no clear disclosure that they were machine-generated at the point where the template had failed. Gannett paused the LedeAI tool across the local markets where it had been in use.
The episode joined a run of AI-in-journalism embarrassments that year, following similar controversies at CNET, which had quietly published AI-written financial explainers containing factual errors, and at Sports Illustrated, whose publisher was found to have run AI-generated articles under fabricated author bylines. Together these cases became reference points in the argument that speed and cost savings from automated content generation could not substitute for editorial review, feeding into policies like the one the Associated Press had issued two weeks earlier.