Credit: Cleveland.com
By Sean Keeley on

On Wednesday, Cleveland.com wanted to highlight its Cleveland Cavaliers podcast, Wine & Gold Talk, as it discusses the team’s NBA Playoffs run.

So, they posted a video of host Ethan Sands, presumably, from the podcast, discussing Donovan Mitchell’s poise in big moments. It also included a link to an article on their site where people could also watch or listen to the rest of the podcast.

On paper, that all checks out as normal. However, it didn’t take much sleuthing to watch the video and realize it was AI-generated.

A quick scroll through their social media feeds revealed an even worse version of this, with a cartoon version of Today in Ohio host (and editor of Cleveland.com and the Plain Dealer) Chris Quinn and content director Laura Johnston using their audio from the podcast.

It’s nearly impossible to find something that everyone can agree on these days, but if you take a look at the comment sections on Cleveland.com’s social media feeds, it’s pretty much universal how much everyone hates this.

It appears that Cleveland.com has been making these videos for a little bit, despite what sounds like an overwhelmingly negative reaction.

Quinn, who has never been one to mince words, is at the forefront of these efforts. In October, he highlighted a job listing for an “AI rewrite specialist.” In January, that role was filled, and this person was “working on stories with AI’s help, using an in-house version of ChatGPT provided by the newsroom’s corporate parent, Advance Local,” per Columbia Journalism Review. In a letter to Cleveland.com readers, Quinn called out journalism schools for failing to instill a willingness to use AI in students.

“Artificial intelligence is not bad for newsrooms,” he wrote. “It’s the future of them.”

While Quinn received harsh pushback on those sentiments, he was apparently undaunted. And that’s presumably how we got to AI-slop versions of the newspaper’s reporters to promote their podcasts.

Axios reporter Sam Allard posted a screenshot of a text purporting to be from Quinn in response to the video’s criticism. After saying he planned to write another column explaining the strategy, he wrote that they’re “using AI because we don’t have resources to do it any other way.”

That’s odd framing because there is literal video of the real Ethan Sands doing the podcast that the AI version is mimicking. And anyone who works in podcast clipping can tell you that you can clip a video like that in minutes. The time spent QAing an AI version would absolutely take longer.

“Second, the characters we’ve used so far are, indeed, cheerful in appearance,” added Quinn. “Isn’t there enough gloom in the news already?”

We’re not sure what Sands would make of the notion that his editor thinks the real version of him is too gloomy to be promoted.

“Third, I really don’t pay attention to troll comments on social media. They attack everything,” he wrote. “The measure of success here is whether people watch them.”

The problem there is that the metrics all tell a story of universal negativity. The posts on X have been ratio’d to the moon, and you can’t find a positive comment on Instagram. If the videos have decent view numbers, it appears to be hate-watches and morbid curiosity, neither of which has a shelf life.

Quinn and Cleveland.com seem fully committed to this experiment despite the near-universal pushback and common sense. We wish their reporters and staff well as readers continue to respond accordingly.

About Sean Keeley

Along with writing for Awful Announcing and The Comeback, Sean is the Managing Editor for Comeback Media. Previously, he created the Syracuse blog Troy Nunes Is An Absolute Magician and wrote 'How To Grow An Orange: The Right Way to Brainwash Your Child Into Rooting for Syracuse.' He has also written non-Syracuse-related things for SB Nation, Curbed, and other outlets. He currently lives in Seattle where he is complaining about bagels. Send tips/comments/complaints to sean@thecomeback.com.

View all posts by Sean Keeley