F A I L
A guy interested in the spooky technology implications of this
thing gave it a whirl and posted the results on Reddit. “It could be
used to create fake articles indiscernible from human-generated
text—really neat and frankly kind of scary stuff!” he told me, om-
inously.
Thankfully, the robot sucks at this.
“Most of the results would either end up being a garbled
mess of made up stats or way off the mark. Generating text for
LeBron at one point gave me back a boring story on Jameson
whiskey, for example,” said the Reddit user U/Allegorithmic, who
wouldn’t give me his name, since he’s a person doing this kind of
thing on Reddit.
He tried out the AI on nine other players. All of them were bad.
Kawhi Leonard, according to his computer, is a former NFL running
back who bemoans that the earth is too big.
This is all to say that, on a week where Zion Williamson of-
ficially entered the NBA and half of the League’s All-Star free
agents started planting rumors about how handsome they are so
they don’t accidentally wind up with no choice but to sign with the
Phoenix Suns, this was the thing that took over the NBA’s informa-
tion ecosystem for a few hours. Beautiful nonsense.
In fact, according to the data, the most viewed piece of basket-
ball information on Reddit in the week after the 2019 NBA Draft is
a video of Rex Chapman getting a dunk blocked by a perfectly still
7-4 Mark Eaton, who either refuses to or cannot jump. The video
is from 1983.
The great tradition of summertime NBA nostalgia and feel-
good garbage is alive and well. The thirst for useless NBA trash
will not be drowned out by useful information, thank god.Robots taking peoples’ jobs is a real thing. But we’re pretty sure
that NBA prognosticators don’t need to worry too much.SHORT CIRCUIT
THE OUTLETALWAYS BY BEN COLLINSI
f you’ve been injecting NBA propaganda into your eyes and
ears for the last few months (which I have, because it makes
me feel good), you’ve probably heard the League’s newest,
most escape room-like catchphrase:
The NBA is now a year-round league.
This is, for the most part, very true. The NBA Draft came exactly
seven days after the Raptors clinched the NBA Finals. The Antho-
ny Davis trade came somewhere in between that, creating a very
dangerous Saturday where one-third of all Americans had to pre-
tend to be violently ill so they could cancel plans and refresh Twit-
ter all night.
Then free agency. Then Summer League. Then probably a
weird trade demand. The NBA! It never stops! There is no longer
any time, the NBA wants you to think, for its fans to come up with
fully loco hot takes in the sweltering heat of the summer, desper-
ate for something resembling a new basketball discussion.
Adam Silver’s elaborate plot to drown out his league’s dumbest,
weirdest fans has won.
That’s what I thought, at least, until I read the following;
“LeBron James came to Cleveland in 1995, where his legacy
had changed, and he won a total of 14 championships—which in-
cluded nine titles during his tenure while in charge in Miami and
a pair of championships in Cleveland while playing there. LeBron
James has won 15 championship rings during his career and 14 of
his 15 titles are his first. That’s a total of 26.”
That translated stroke you just read was written by a comput-
er running a cutting edge artificial intelligence text generator. It
was supposed to create realistic player descriptions for the Top 10
players in the NBA.NOYZ>>Big ups to our guy Alex Wong, whose book on the 2018-19 Raptors is out now. Go cop
that...And congrats to all of our friends in Toronto, including Alex, Holly, Charlie, Jamal, Due,
Duane and many others...SLAM Summer Classic Vol. 2 is gonna be incredible...Zion, we need you
in the dunk contest, dog...Nike’s NYvsNY is once again killing it this summer...John Havlicek...BATHES: COURTESY HAMPTON ATHLETICS; TOEWS: COURTESY OF UNCW ATHLETICS18 SLAMONLINE.COM