The Future of Football Writing

And why Vincent Van Klopp will take your breath away

Warring rivalries, maintaining an edge on the competition and pushing the boundaries of innovation are all key parts of the football landscape these days, but it’s within the sphere of technology behemoths - and the topic of Artificial Intelligence - that sparked the idea for this article.

It’s been big news, but if you haven’t heard there’s some new technology recently released called ChatGPT by San Fransisco-based start up OpenAI.

“It’s a free online tool trained on millions of pages of writing from all corners of the internet to understand and respond to text-based queries in just about any style you want. 

When I ask it to explain ChatGPT to my mom, it cranks out, “ChatGPT is a computer program that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to understand and respond to natural language text, just like a human would. It can answer questions, write sentences, and even have a conversation with you. It's like having your own personal robot that can understand and talk to you!” (USA Today)

For more context, and to learn why this is such a significant step within the technology - and wider - world, there’s a couple of video below analysing why the battle between Google and Microsoft could shape the way we use the internet for decades.

Crucially though, we aren’t going to focus on the above, instead this is going to ask the question about what it means for the future of football writing.

Will this mean the end of The Tomkins Times? Will the infamous TTT dungeon be no more? Will Martin Samuel have to get a new job in Greggs? Will the days of pop up ads on The Echo’s website making their football writing literally unreadable come to an end? Or is this a bigger overreaction than some Liverpool’s fans’ meltdowns on February 1st after we failed to sign a midfielder? Who knows, but for our first exercise - and you can try it yourself here - let’s ask ChatGPT why the Reds have struggled so much in the league this season (and bear in mind it took about 30 seconds for this to be written).