SI AI Ai-yi-yi

In My the Day, We Knew What "Raze" Meant

It hurt my heart the other day to learn that Sports Illustrated was running AI-generated stories by AI-generated writers. I spent some good years as a Sports Illustrated writer, on staff from 1968 to '75 and as a freelance contributor, off and on, for several years after that. I had heard, lately, that the magazine's current incarnation was a mostly-online shoddy imitation. But I never thought it would replace the modern-day likes of me with Artificial Intelligence.

         What a drag it will be, if I live long enough to have to persuade Generation Whatever that in my day, Frank Deford and Dan Jenkins and Bud Shrake and Curry Kirkpatrick and I, and many others, were real. Figments of our own imagination, perhaps, but not until the next morning, after we had finished interviewing and even hanging with athletes and other actual crazy people in the flesh. Curry, to be sure, would line his copy with questionable jokes about, I don't know, carnivorous cheerleaders or something, but that was so the editors would cut those and not his other boundary-pushing tropes.