Why We're Not Using AI For Your League's Content

The internet may not have always been great but it feels like it might be the worst it has ever been right now. Small websites are dying out and the ones that have managed to stick around are drowning in AI generated garbage. Fantasy football in particular seems to be suffering here: every day a new tool "powered by AI" promises to win you your fantasy league. That's where we come in. Not to win you your league... we probably can't help with that. But to give your league some custom content that doesn't reek of Chat-GPT voice.

In the early aughts, my brother built a Creed fan website that became the #1 Creed fan website in the world. Its best feature was streaming mp3's back before it was cool. That feature was a double-edged sword for our household. It vaulted the website -- which used my father's real estate domain -- to number 1 in the world. Unfortunately, it was hosted on our home server and it sent our Adelphia bill TO THE MOON. What I'm getting at is that we are standing on the shoulders of a giant. And our goal is to nepo-baby our way via the power of Creed to a successful web-based business here.

Since this website began as Commissioner Genius back before ChatGPT was released, I've frequently had users mention in passing "the AI recap". While I appreciate any mention of the word intelligence in association with my work, I'd like to clear a couple things up. When we write the recaps, they will mention your owners, teams, and players specifically. However, they aren't generated with AI. We use variables to insert league-specific information into the recaps. On our end, the sections of newsletters look something like the following:

"Remember those NBA games from the late '90s where they couldn't get the rights to use Michael Jordan's name, so they'd just make a 'Player 99' on the Chicago Bulls with attributes absolutely juiced? [player_tagged_as_mvp] was week 2's Player 99. It's not illegal to use this player but it definitely did not feel fair."

"[player_tagged_as_mvp] was our week 3 laser tag psycho. He's taking that weird printout they give you of the stats and framing it. Pulling it out years later to try to impress grown women with his 4.5 KDR. He's unencumbered by pesky concepts like "having fun" and "enjoying himself" - this man is locked in and beating some ass."

*You will notice em dashes in my writing. I will never forgive Chat GPT for making everyone think that em dashes are only used by AI. I have always used them. And I won't stop now....

One key distinction between our recaps and what you might see on some sites promising "AI Generated Recaps". Real, human experiences. And they won't always be pretty. You might be able to find a service that says "Congratulations to Team A for beating Team B. They won by 4 points. Nice job." But good luck finding anything else like this:

"{player_tagged_as_mvp} inspired fear this week. Not regular-old 'there’s a spider in the house' fear…no, this was akin to accepting a birthday party invite in 8th grade that you didn’t realize was a pool party until it was much later. Now Olivia Valentine is gonna see my jelly rolls and lack of armpit hair. This fear leads to clouded judgement - you think, 'oh, I got it! I’ll just wear my shirt into the pool. That way nobody can tell I’ve been pounding too many Totino’s Pizza Rolls for the past 12 years.' People see right through this…literally.”

Over the past couple years (before we went insane and decided to quit our full-time jobs), we occasionally fed our recaps into Chat GPT and had it correct grammatical errors. This being a full time operation now, it's my promise that we won't use AI in any capacity to generate content for your leagues. Your league deserves better than the standard, soulless ChatGPT generated recaps.

The only AI-type integration I envision right now is something that has your league's data as context that you could ask factual questions to. I've tested this type of integration in the past and it hasn't worked super well to this point but who knows? Maybe the models will get better...

In any event, I want to make it clear that when we're writing content for your league, it is generated by a human being. Does that mean that sometimes our content will suck and make you hate us? Maybe. But unlike AI slop, there’s also a chance that it won’t suck. I’ve developed this chart to illustrate this point.

Before the literary nerds yell at me here – 5% is as low as chance-of-sucking can go. Many will argue that Dan Brown should be higher than 40%, perhaps even higher than Fantasy Genius. But another core tenant here is honesty. And reader, I won’t lie to you…I thought Angels and Demons slapped. Granted, I was 11 years old when I read it. But still…I’m going with 40%.

-Mike

In the process of fact-checking this post, I learned that Adelphia essentially went full Enron and yet has not garnered nearly the public attention that Enron did despite having some incredible details in their story, like this one:

They were accused of spending the money on a lengthy list of personal luxuries. Prosecutors said John Rigas had ordered two Christmas trees flown to New York for his daughter at a cost of $6,000

Being 10 years old at the time, I assumed the reason the logo on our remote changed from Adelphia to Comcast was your run-of-the-mill acquisition. Well if you're like me, I'm here to tell you that's not the case. These fat cats were lining their pockets with Creed Stream Money and using it to buy souped up Christmas trees. We can't let them get away with it.