The Jets May Want To Reconsider Being “AI-First”
What does it mean for an NFL team to be “AI-first?” It’s a question that football fans have been pondering ever since New York Jets Chief Analytics and Data Officer Iwao Fusillo revealed in May that the organization would be striving to “to think AI-first.” It was hard to detect the influence of AI in the Jets’ 23-10 win over the Titans in Week 1, but maybe that’s just because the paltry competition didn’t require unleashing the awesome power of Microsoft Copilot on the gridiron. They might be saving that for Week 2 against the Packers. The organization did, however, find a novel use for AI away from the field.
On Aug. 23, a random Titans fan tweeted, “If the #TitanUp lose to the Jets week 1 I will walk from MetLife Stadium all the way to Nissan Stadium non stop.” This is the kind of post that yippy social media managers dream about, because it creates the opportunity to use the official team account to clap back, perhaps even epically, and thus earn a lot of replies that say, “Yoooooo, admin snapped on this one [three fire emoji]” from guys who have forgotten the password to their Robinhood account. This morning, whoever runs the official Jets Twitter account made their move, and quote-tweeted the Titans fan’s tweet with this:
Sure, whatever LLM was used to create this image may have put Detroit in Canada, created a worryingly skinny Indiana, and hallucinated a demilitarized zone between Virginia and West Virginia, but its creation saved someone from having to open Google Maps and spend 25 seconds manually producing a geographically accurate version of the same image. And you really can’t put a price on such a meaningful streamlining of productivity, can you?
