Member Insights: Will robots be creating all sports content in the future?

In this Member Insights piece David Granger, Content Director at Cinch looks into how AI will impact content creation in the world of sport.

There’s been a lot of chatter around AI in recent months. From being the saviour of the illiterate to heralding the downfall of humanity, everyone has an opinion or a ChatGPT-written thought-piece about it. But how will it affect sport and content production arounds sport?

As the business grows in financial terms (global sports rights will break the $60bn barrier in 2024 according to SportsBusiness.com, it also is broadening and deepening its audience. The rise in popularity of esports, women’s sport, college sport and betting within sport, means there’s a lot to consume and a lot of games, matches and races to discuss, and wager on.

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And that – as ever – is what makes sport fascinating. There is so much speculation, gossip, rumour, narrative, prediction, analysis and commentary that it’s never, ever dull.

However, as digital and social gave everyone the chance to have their opinion broadcast to the world, output hasn’t always been as innovative as it could be. And now, with AI producing even more of this at the drop of a prompt, the content landfill is about to get even more bloated.

The rise of behind-the-scenes documentaries hasn’t helped. That particular arena is already seeing signs of eating itself. From F1 to football to tennis and golf, the docuseries portfolio is getting bigger and not necessarily better. In fact, it’s getting more self-referential and self-aware. Athletes, players (and drivers) are playing as much to the streaming service’s cameras as they are the spectators in situ.

Watch the latest Drive to Survive series and it’s full of references to Netflix and stilted on-camera conversations. But perhaps the most pointless waste of production time is the teams’ own content teams following the Netflix crew around, shooting the behind-the-scenes of the behind-the-scenes. It begs the question, who exactly is consuming this content?

Which brings us to artificially created content. From images to team selections to match reports, ChatGPT, Bard and Midjourney can now create content on the fly using information already on the internet. In other words, it’s curating what is already out there, re-formating it and presenting it as created content.

A more intuitive Google.

Not that it doesn’t have its uses. However, currently they’re more novelty than practical.
Check out this MediaCells blog. They spotted a great piece on an Everton FC fan forum which asked ChatGPT how exactly the club should be run.

In an attempt to see how far ChatGPT could take over production of sports content, I put in
the brief for this piece (Write a 500-word column for the world’s biggest sports industry
community website explaining how AI will affect content around sport.). You can read it here. It’s more balanced than expected, but still sides with the AI solution. It’s also not obsessed with Drive to Survive…