Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we're talking LLMs, bandwagon fans, and more.
Hello! Drew is still on vacation, so I will be fielding your questions this week. How fun!
Shane:
After a funbag is posted, it is made public that every single answered question was created by ChatGPT. Would you mind? Would you feel the need to respond? Do submitted poop stories need to be created by humans?
If it was discovered that it was really just an AI program called Magary-o-matic spitting out answers to funbag questions, that would be a bummer.
This is an interesting problem, because in order to think about it, you first need to acknowledge a kind of open secret among people who read and write advice columns, which is that a lot of the questions people submit are fake. They are usually pretty easy to spot, and when I was writing mine I would generally try to avoid answering them, but a brief glance through the archives over at Slate or Reddit’s AITA will reveal the scope of the situation. Now, I don’t think it’s unethical to publish a fake question even if you are almost certain it’s fake, because the point of advice columns isn’t actually to offer one specific person advice. Fake questions can provoke answers that speak to something real and universal.
But I would be disappointed to learn a question was not simply fake in the sense of not describing with perfect felicity a situation the letter writing was experiencing in their life, but fake in the sense of the result of asking ChatGPT to write a letter likely to be answered by Drew Magary in Defector’s Funbag column. I’ll be honest here: I’m not sure I have an entirely coherent reason for this distinction, but I feel it matters.
Fake questions in the first sense still reveal something about the person submitting them. Sometimes they reveal biases the letter writer would like affirmed, or fantasies a person cannot yet bring themselves to fully embrace. Often it’s simply a matter of someone wanting to be noticed by a writer they admire. The people who write in like Drew—that much is very clear when you get a peek at the inbox, as I have recently—and when he devotes his attention to a particular question, that attention is felt by the person who submitted it. When people email stories about their children, their friends, their fears, and (this is probably unique to Drew) their bowel movements, they are offering up something of themselves in the hopes it will intrigue or delight him. I suppose, if that’s the goal, it may be tempting to have ChatGPT help craft something that Drew is likely to notice, but I can’t help suspect that would be a hollow reward.
Paul:
What if the last wild card spot for each conference went to the team who, after week 18, and had not otherwise qualified for the playoffs, has the longest active winning streak? Regular wild card tiebreakers would apply. The effect would make it so no team is really ever out of it (because a one-win winning streak after week 18 might be good enough to get in!). The intent would be to reduce tanking, and keep fans' interests up, even when their team is sub-par most of the year. As I write this in the middle of week 17, the wild-wild card would go to the Vikings and probably the Bengals. Last year, it probably would have been Seattle and Cincinnati—two teams that were not bad at the end of the season!
Also, I like this idea for the NBA too, where tanking has been more prevalent.
I know there are some arguments against it, but those arguments are wrong. Right?
I could not begin to weigh the merits and risks of your proposal, but it sounds kinda zany and fun, so why not. I approve.
Since I needed questions to round out this column, and since there weren’t many on offer that I’m capable of answering, I’ll just use this space to say something else, somewhat related to the question about ChatGPT and its ills. What I would like to say is that I do not enjoy the word “slop.” Merriam-Webster declared it the word of the year, which I sort of understand because it’s everywhere lately, but that’s partly why I hate it so much. The other part is that it’s ugly, but since the thing it’s meant to describe is also aesthetically repulsive, I’m willing to bear this. The “everywhereness” of it is really my gripe here. Constrained to the limits of describing the products of AI, or used even slightly more broadly as an umbrella term for what we used to call “content,” I could live with it. But every day now I encounter it appended to something new: goonerslop, conspiracyslop, wordslop, streamingslop, etc. Yesterday I saw someone describe a human writer who produces (admittedly bad and stupid) regular columns as a “slopumnist.” The thing about LLMs is that they work by making associations. We should aspire to doing more with language than that. We can aim for precision, novelty, and beauty. If we abandon this in order to pump out endless variations of the same insults, why bother making fun of what machines sound like in the first place?
HALFTIME!
Brian:
I have a friend from high school who may be the world’s worst case of bandwagoning. In the nearly 30 years I have known him, he has been a consistent fan of Mississippi State and the Atlanta Braves, as well as a revolving door of “it” teams. At various points, he has been a fan of Notre Dame, Miami, Texas, Oklahoma, and Florida. He used to be a Tennessee Titans fan because of Steve McNair, but is now a Cowboys fan because of Dak Prescott. And for the last few years he has been a Chiefs fan. I used to make fun of him for his flavor of the month bandwagoning, especially because none of these teams won championships during the time he liked them (except Florida). When I went home to see my parents this Christmas, I met up with him like I always do to see a movie. He was wearing a Dodgers T-shirt and an Edmonton Oilers hat. He has never been interested in hockey the entire time I’ve known him. I don’t really have a question. I just need validation that he’s nuts.
Brian, I think you are overlooking a real, and extremely funny possibility here, which is that your friend has been doing a decades-long bit with the aim of undermining your sense of fairness, to the point that you are driven to email advice columnists at sports websites and ask them to affirm your own relative sanity. I can only tip my Colorado Avalanche cap to him, thus revealing that underneath it I am also wearing an OKC Thunder cap.
Justin:
You have to choose one in order to win $1 million cash: Drive from Miami to Seattle while listening to only Fox News on Sirius, OR, drive from San Diego to Portland, ME, while listening to nothing but NFL various talk radio stations, but it's only Green Bay fans, Bears fans, and Steeler fans calling in with questions.
Respectfully, how much money are you worth? Is it like $120 million? Because that’s the only way I can explain how this question would make even a little bit of sense to you. The answer is either one. Either one would be a wholly delightful way to earn $1 million cash. Hell, I would do both, one right after the other. Additionally, I would do it in a car without air conditioning, or power steering. I would do it with the girl who bullied me in middle school as a passenger. I would take this two-part road trip with a YouTuber named Zayden who speaks incomprehensible zoomer lingo. Like, whenever we drive past something remotely interesting, he would say “sightmaxxing type shit” and I would politely nod. You cannot begin to imagine the indignities I would bear for $1 million cash.
