Good morning, Cleveland Browns fans!
It is a good morning, as the Cleveland Browns got some needed positive news yesterday about their injured players. Starting quarterback Dorian Thompson-Robinson is in concussion protocol, of course, which effectively puts him in limbo for a while, but Myles Garrett and Amari Cooper both appear to have avoided serious damage from the Broncos game.
Kevin Stefanski is playing coy about who would start at quarterback should DTR remain in the concussion protocol, as Joe Flacco adjusts to the Browns playbook and P.J. Walker stands ready. The consensus assumption is that it would be Flacco, but we can expect lots of speculation over the next few days as the situation remains murky.
Nonetheless, expect Stefanski to be relentlessly pestered about injury updates and quarterback starting jobs Wednesday through Friday during his press availabilities on the West Coast.
Also dogging Stefanski will be questions on his play-calling last Sunday, where the “run the ball more” camp refuses to be dissuaded by the actual game tape which shows a more complex picture of games within games being played between the rival coaches. While the simplistic big-picture points to running the ball constantly – and all the data points about the Broncos’ defense and DTR’s inexperience in noisy away stadiums are valid – the Browns’ offense was getting very much on track until the dubious hit on DTR took him out of the game.
The holidays are a strange time for me, as I’m forced to engage with human beings whose lives do not revolve around professional football 24/7. Weirdos.
Their misplaced priorities aside, we wind up discussing all sorts of things, including how developments in the “real world” impact their daily lives. One such conversation was with a female relative who works in graphic design and is paid for caricature work, often of pets. She takes requests online and churns out the work via her drawing tablet and computer and has made a decent living at it.
But now, she’s struggling. The reason? Generative artificial intelligence has allowed people to start creating their own “artwork” by stuffing commands into AI tools. I honestly have no idea how this works, but I hopefully argued with her that it sounds like a fad because the product has to be soulless.
On the drive back home, where I had plenty of time to think while dodging freaks on the Interstate, I thought about whether this technology could threaten my business here at the OBR and concluded it could. Given the right parameters, it wouldn’t be hard to use generative AI to churn out certain types of writing. My biggest fear isn’t that I had to start using it but that competitors would drown the OBR’s old-fashioned hand-written text with repetitive copy, drowning us out in a sea of babble.
Of course, one look at Google, social media, and the work of aggregators in the sports realm might indicate that this has already happened. I don’t know.
But I’m not the only one concerned about it, given the hubbub yesterday in the sports world when news broke that AI-written stories had appeared on Sports Illustrated without notice. The story exploded across the particularly nerdy sportswriting realm, leading SI to deny that it was their work. Instead, the site maintains, it was a third-party writing “paid content” articles for product placement, which I’ve always considered just about as noxious.
Either way, the story was a shot across the bow. Like most anything made up of humans, the media has both good and bad things about it. But at least it’s human, for now. I still much prefer the output of our mushy brain things to their hard, cold, and often oblivious digital counterparts.
