In August, Gnet, the country's largest newspaper company, rolled out a new artificial intelligence

service that would provide automated high school sports coverage in Illinois, Texas, Wisconsin,

Tennessee, Ohio, Arizona, and Indiana. And within a matter of days, it had gone horribly wrong.

People on Twitter slash X quickly discovered that bizarre phrases like, quote,

close encounters of the athletic kind, or how one team, quote, took victory away from another

had shown up in hundreds of local news stories. As Scott Simon explained on NPR,

in some of these AI articles, there were robotic placeholders where there should have been a mascot's

name. The Worthington Christian winning team mascot defeated the Westerville North losing team

mascot two one in an Ohio boys soccer game on Saturday. It's according to a story that ran

last month in the Columbus district. Go winning team mascots. Our client had a PR problem on their

hands. Jay Allred is the CEO of Source Media Properties, which includes Richland Source, a local

news organization in Ohio. He's also the co-founder of Lead AI, the company that built the technology

that Gennett was using to automate some of its coverage. Gennett put an indefinite pause on

the project of reporting high school sports results using AI with us. And we are no longer

producing content for Gennett. Jay agreed to speak to me about what went wrong. His first extensive

interview since his deal with Gennett blew up. I wanted to understand why he built this technology

in the first place. How it's supposed to work. And whether this disaster had shaken his belief

in the potential of AI in journalism. He told me that his team began building and using Lead AI

in his own newsroom at Richland Source a few years ago. After they learned that they could draw

on high school sports results from a service called score stream, which collects game results

often recorded by fans. Let's just take the state of Ohio for example. We look at all of the

high confidence games in the state of Ohio and then we're analyzing the box score. So if we're

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