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In late August, Gannett, the country\\u2019s largest newspaper company, rolled out a new artificial intelligence service that promised to automate high school sports coverage across the country. And within a matter of days it had gone horribly wrong.\\xa0People on Twitter quickly discovered that bizarre phrases like \\u201cclose encounters of the athletic kind,\\u201d or how one team \\u201ctook victory away\\u201d from another, had shown up on Gannett news sites in Florida, Indiana, Georgia, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. As Scott Simon explained on NPR, in some of these AI articles there were robotic place holders where there should\\u2019ve been a mascot\\u2019s name.

Jay Allred is the CEO of Source Media Properties, which includes Richland Source, a local news organization in Ohio, and LedeAI, the company that built the technology that Gannett was using to automate its high school coverage. For the midweek podcast, OTM correspondent Micah Loewinger speaks with Jay\\xa0about what went wrong, why he wanted to build this technology in the first place, and whether this disaster had shaken his belief in its potential.