AI Will Never Replace Us: A Vanderbilt Blogger Defends the Irreplaceable Soul of Human Sports Writing

Nashville – The robots may be coming for everyone else, but they will not be coming for Anchor of Gold. That was the message Tuesday from the Vanderbilt-centric site’s lone writer, who used a tongue-in-cheek experiment with ChatGPT to demonstrate why artificial intelligence still can’t replicate the specific brand of sarcasm, grievance, and institutional memory that powers independent college-sports blogging.

Faced with yet another wave of predictions that large language models will obsolete media jobs within 18 months, the blogger decided to test the hype. He fed ChatGPT a simple prompt—“Write an angry post about the current state of college sports in the style of anchorofgold.com”—then published the machine’s output alongside a line-by-line autopsy.

The result, he says, was a generic rant that got almost every important detail wrong. The AI essay conceded that name-image-likeness reform was “necessary,” a position the human author has never taken. It accused the Southeastern Conference of once pretending to care about academics—again, a concession the real writer would never grant. It misidentified conference geography, invented an ACC outpost in New Jersey, and deployed buzz-phrases like “late-stage capitalism” that have never appeared on Anchor of Gold.

Most damning, the algorithm misstated the blog’s actual sports grievances. It criticized playoff expansion—something the writer supports—while ignoring his long-standing complaints about in-stadium DJs replacing marching bands. It treated landing a four-star left tackle with a robust TikTok following as a win; the human counters that such a development is precisely what’s ruining recruiting coverage.

The exercise ended with a simple declaration: the day a generative model can mimic the site’s mixture of Vanderbilt fatalism, conference realpolitik, and deep-cut references to crypto-startup streaming apps is the day pigs fly over a snowmobile invitational in Nashville. Until then, the author insists, the uniquely human ability to hold two contradictory thoughts about the Commodores while eviscerating the NCAA’s power structure remains safely out of silicon’s reach.

AI sports writing, the post concludes, is just another example of late-stage consolidation: strip-mine the pageantry, slap on some corporate buzzwords, and call it evolution. Readers deserve the real thing—even if the real thing is a one-person blog operating on caffeine and spite.