Announced today by the conference itself, Canada West has partnered with Fanword, embracing the AI phenomenon to be the "first-of-its-kind storytelling tool that makes it easier than ever to create powerful and authentic feature stories". If you like stories written by generative AI, this will surely have you excited.
However, if you're someone like me who appreciates the effort by student journalists and broadcasters chasing down a story and putting their sweat into getting those facts right, this move by Canada West is yet another reason why I honestly believe the people who run the athletic conference have zero interest in pushing the athletes and its member schools into any sort of mainstream conversation.
"We are extremely excited to partner with FanWord as we look to increase our storytelling capacity," said Jamin Heller, Associate Director, Communications & Marketing for Canada West. "We have so many incredible student-athletes across all 17 member institutions that are doing remarkable things both on-and-off the field of competition. Being able to leverage FanWord's unique tools will allow us to share their stories in captivating new ways."
What you should know is that Jamin is lying to you.
Rather than having the schools themselves promote those students and their stories, you'll hear stories of athletics departments slashing budgets and being unable to cover these stories due to a lack of staffing. This will happen despite all of these schools having school newspapers and most having campus radio stations where these stories could come alive with a little cooperation, so Canada West has decided to empower their schools by harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to generate stories about their students.
You may be wondering where the drawback is, and it comes in the form that generative AI doesn't tell you the whole story in any capacity. According to the release, "Canada West will leverage FanWord's cutting-edge storytelling software to craft compelling stories with greater ease," but there was never any difficulty in crafting those stories before. It simply took a journalist or a broadcaster a few moments with an athlete to get his or her story, and the time required to build that story into an article or piece that stands on its own.
I'm not one to pat myself on the back for the work I did on Canada West broadcasts during my time working for one of the schools, but there are stories that needed to be told for people to have a greater understanding about some of the incredible things that athletes were doing. One of those athletes was Bailee Bourassa of the Saskatchewan Huskies who raised a pile of money for Haven Kids' House while honouring Rhodes McNairn, a young boy battling cancer.
Would that story have the same emotion and feeling if it was an AI-generated text story? Probably not. Does it matter to hear Bailee tell her version of the story? Absolutely, in my view, because those are her honest thoughts about not only the game, but helping to change lives in Saskatoon. Would you get the visuals and the audio if this were an AI-generated article? You would not, and that's why having the Huskies use the HuskiesFan app to have their stories told is, in my opinion, so vitally important for those athletes' stories and messages to become part of the discussion.
I get that artificial intelligence isn't going away and is, in fact, becoming more and more prevalent in daily life. Whether it be Apple introducing a learning AI through Siri or TV and movies scripts being generated by ChatGPT, artificial intelligence is likely here to stay. I can't fault those who use it, but there are some jobs that require a little more heart and a little more humanity than what AI can deliver.
When it comes to journalism, there are codes of conduct and standards of professionalism that human journalists follow. AI isn't bound by ethics or morals when it comes to knowing or respecting the rights and dignity of sources and subjects. AI doesn't provide context, analysis, or interpretation of any statistics nor will provide insight into comments made or responses given by the athletes whose stories are told. In short, there is a need for human interaction when it comes to emotional and intelligent storytelling, and AI simply isn't human enough to do that.
I've been critical of Canada West on this blog before because of all the shortfalls it employs when it comes to promoting its teams and athletes, but this might be the biggest failure on their part of them all. All this opportunity does is allow athletics departments to feed information into the FanWord AI machine and wait for the results. Yes, there may be some massaging of the stories to give them more humanity, but these athletic departments could save themselves a pile of headaches by simply partnering with their campus newspapers and radio stations to produce engaging stories about their athletes.
On a broader scale, if generative artificial intelligence is still being investigated when it comes to how it will affect education by most schools in Canada, having the sports branch of western Canadian universities using it with no limits should pose a moral and ethical issue for most schools. After all, if it's being banned for use in classrooms by some professors, how can those schools employ generative artificial intelligence to write stories about the very students who are prohibited from using it?
Everything about this announcement from Canada West today just indicates that they're willing to take the easy road when it comes to self-promotion. Nothing about this partnership should excite anyone, and it should make a lot of athletic departments a little more cautious when it comes to protecting their athletes. Generative AI is cutting edge, but the list of expensive errors is well-documented. They include:
- Grok, the AI chatbot featured on Elon Musk’s X social media site, falsely accused NBA star Klay Thompson of throwing bricks through windows of multiple houses in Sacramento, California in April 2024.
- Attorney Steven Schwartz used OpenAI's ChatGPT to find prior cases to support a case filed by Avianca employee Roberto Mata for injuries he sustained in 2019. At least six of the cases submitted in the brief didn't exist.
- Microsoft released Tay, an AI chatbot, on Twitter in 2016 to learn about human interactions. Within 16 hours, the chatbot posted more than 95,000 tweets, and those tweets rapidly turned overtly racist, misogynist, and anti-Semitic tweets, prompting Microsoft to shut down Tay.
- A 2024 demo video for OpenAI's SearchGPT failed to provide the correct dates for a festival taking place in Boone, North Carolina despite this information being easily findable online.
- Delivery parcel service DPD closes its online chatbot in January 2024 after a customer shows in a post on X that it can easily be manipulated into swearing and criticizing the company and itself.
- MSN news was in trouble after an AI headline dubs the late Brandon Hunter as "useless at 42" following the NBA star's sudden death. The headline forced Microsoft to admit that it has been quietly removing badly written AI articles from its site for some time.
Maybe my standards are too high. Maybe I just care more about the athletes who wow me with their athletic and academic abilities than Canada West does. Maybe I just know more about AI problems than I should. Whatever the case may be, this decision by Canada West will lead to the loss of student journalists doing longer pieces on athletes, lead to more cookie-cutter articles about athletes, and potentially lead to inaccurate or false information being spread about these athletes if people aren't careful. None of that would happen if humans were filing the stories, but Canada West has opted to allow its 17 schools to wander into uncharted territory.
To put it bluntly, Canada West has failed its athletes. Again. Unsurprisingly. I guess my standards are indeed too high.
Until next time, keep your sticks on the ice!
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