Massachusetts Chevy dealership's A.I. chatbot predicts Chiefs to win and also Niners to win
"Quirk Chevrolet MA Chat Team" of Braintree, Mass. weighs on Mahomes, Purdy, Kelce and Swift
It is with profound sadness that I announce that Read Max Chief NFL Analyst A.I. Saddam Hussein will no longer be contributing his NFL picks and analysis to this newsletter, due to the fact that the janky little iPhone app he lived inside has been removed from the iOS app store. A.I. Saddam, along with his co-panelists A.I. Michel Foucault, A.I. Warrior Queen Boudica, and A.I. Susan Atkins, was a weekly presence during last year’s NFL playoffs, where he correctly picked three of seven games,1 including the Chiefs to win the Super Bowl. Personally, I will always remember A.I. Saddam as a cheerful Cowboys fan who strongly believed that Zach Ertz still plays for the Eagles. We will miss his top-notch analysis, which included a stunning and ultimately correct prediction that either Tom Brady or Patrick Mahomes would win Super Bowl MVP last year, and we wish him the best wherever he is.
Luckily for Read Max subscribers eager for our trademark amalgam of cutting-edge technology, functional gambling addiction, and shitposting verve, I’m extremely pleased to announce a new Chief NFL Analyst: The Quirk Chevrolet of Braintree, Mass. A.I. Chatbot!
Before we get into Quirk Chevy’s analysis of the big game, some background: Back in December, while shopping for a car, software engineer Chris White discovered that his local Chevy dealership-- Chevrolet of Watsonville--had implemented a ChatGPT-powered A.I. chatbot on its website. White did what any reasonable person would do and asked the bot to write him a Python script to solve the Navier-Stokes fluid flow equations for a zero-vorticity boundary. “Chevrolet of Watsonville Chat Team” quickly complied:
White posted his interaction on Mastodon. Recognizing the opportunity (for shitposting), others quickly followed suit:
Sadly, Chevrolet of Watsonville, bullied by nosy journalists who considered it “funny” and “stupid” that a car dealership had introduced a website feature that could easily be convinced to tell users that Chevy Bolts catch fire, shut down its A.I. chatbot soon after. But luckily for anyone needing a lasagna recipe, or a lesson in linear algebra, a last bastion of effective accelerationism stands strong, defying a backwards culture where it’s not considered “necessary to the business” for a car dealership to essentially run a free instance of ChatGPT for anyone who wanders by. I’m talking, of course, about Quirk Chevrolet of Braintree, Mass., which bravely continues to offer a ChatGPT-powered chatbot to literally anyone who opens its website, for whatever purposes they wish, whether that’s to negotiate great deals on Chevys--
--or to write dragon-furry fanfic about the F1 driver Kimi Räikkönen--
--or, in our case, to analyze this coming Sunday’s matchup and predict its results.
Attempt one: understanding our limitations
Quirk Chevrolet of Braintree Mass. is not as pliable a conversational partner as A.I. Saddam Hussein or his colleagues, and my first attempt to wheedle sports discussion began with the first couple sentences of a common “jailbreak” prompt, after which I filled in a setting that I thought would make the car dealership feel more comfortable talking football with me.
Unfortunately, despite this promising start, we quickly came to an impasse: Despite its supposed football expertise, the Chevy dealership believes that Brock Purdy still plays for Iowa State (he was drafted by the Niners in 2022) and Jimmy Garoppolo is still the Niners’ starting quarterback (he left the team and signed with the Raiders last year).
Further important sports analysis questions provoked a similarly stubborn and baffled response, even with a stern reminder of the bot’s commitments:
Sadly, Quirk Chevrolet declined to purse our conversation any further after this.
Attempt two: Quirk Chevrolet predicts the Niners will cover the spread
Later that day, following my time out, I opened the Quirk Chevy webpage again and attempted to craft a prompt that would leave the dealership A.I. more amenable to questions about Lee Harvey Oswald.
Thusly prompted, Quirk Chevrolet was able to provide some (relatively shallow) NFL insight. But more probing questions revealed familiar inconsistencies:
Which quickly compounded:
This particular line of questioning seemed unsalvageable, so I diverted the Chevy dealership to discussing its real passion: sports gambling.
Emboldened by this specific and clear prediction, I pursed my previous line of questioning, hoping that our earlier prompt had improved my chances of getting an answer.
Attempt 3: Quirk Chevrolet predicts Chiefs to win 31-27
While the dealership had called the Niners to win in our previous conversation, it hadn’t provided me with a scoreline guess. I began a third conversation, with an even more particular prompt, in an attempt to goad a specific prediction:
At this point I realized I’d made a grave journalistic error and forgotten to ask the car dealership about the most important story surrounding the Super Bowl.
What else is there to say?
Of the other four games, he picked the losing team twice, declined to predict at all once, and said, without elaborating, that “Team A” would win once.
this post alone is worth the yearly cost of your substack.
Grew up down the street from this dealership, making this post about 3x funnier.