Link: https://defector.com/nic-carter-fantasy-football-ai-loser

Why does anyone play fantasy football? This is not a trick question, although it's also not particularly difficult to answer. Perhaps they do it for money, or they enjoy football, or they want a shared activity to help stay in touch with friends or family. Whatever the reason, the fun is in picking your guys and managing your little team and hoping you win more often than you lose. Some people have a healthier relationship to this endeavor than others. Still, if none of it appeals to you, then you can always not do it.

One of the saddest things I ever experienced in corporate life was when we had a dumb fitness contest that we split into teams for. We were asked to pick a fun name, usually a pun. I made ours but then out of curiosity put the same prompt into ChatGPT. Every other team name was an AI response. Sigh.

From the title I foolishly thought that maybe he built a machine learning system to optimize player selection by training on the results of hypothetical fantasy football teams from previous seasons, or something, and I thought "well it might not be in the spirit of the competition but at least he's having fun tinkering."

No, he just handed it off to an "agentic" system and lets it play for him because he couldn't be assed. Why even bother?

Everyone who uses AI are the biggest losers in the world, so…. Yes.

It’s because these indies cannot think for themselves anymore. AI has ruined creativity. Even on a silly unimportant level such as this.

I am generally not interested in sports things, so I had no idea what fantasy football is… I thought about Gandalf kicking uruk heads into fire pits, hobbits running circles around Ents and so on.

But nooooooo.

If you do find a fantasy football league that involves Gandalf kicking uruk heads, please invite me to join, because that sounds very fun.

You might enjoy Blood Bowl

I had never heard of this, but based on the wiki description I think you're probably right. Thanks for sharing

The PC versions are quite fun as well, if tabletop play is not your thing.

The computer versions are quite fun, although like the tabletop version they can be exploited. Unsure about the latest version though.

It's like wben xbox talked about implementing AI into games so it can play the games for you. People rightfully so thought it's dumb. But apparently there ia a market.

I'm very not into sports but I had a lot of fun playing fantasy basketball with some coworkers for a couple of years. Fantasy football SUCKS, though

am I reading this wrong, or does the article's author seem to think that the term "sportsball" only refers to baseball?

It's D&D for sports nerds

I'd actually find it kind of interesting to run a league between a bunch of LLMs, Cleverbot, and so on. I'm not enough of a dipshit to take credit for any of the results, of course.

You are. They mean that counting balls and strikes is a reference to baseball

That's strike one. His use of "sportsball" is strike two. (For Nic: These are references to baseball.)

Yes

ah duh yea

No, elon

0 worries. Happens to me all the time.

Can I just say how GLAD I am we don’t have big bulky crts anymore?