If you’re in sports media and leaning on AI-generated takes just to juice your X engagement, Bomani Jones has a message for you: you’re a “f*cking dork.”
That came up on a recent episode of The Right Time with Bomani Jones after Adam Lefkoe brought an example to the table. Lefkoe had sent a suspiciously polished take from an unnamed sports media figure to Nick Wright and immediately flagged it as AI. Wright couldn’t quite see how he knew. Something about all the em dashes, maybe? As a fellow em dash enthusiast, I’d argue that’s not the red flag people think it is. A lot of us were using them before the bots showed up — and we’re not giving them up now.
Still, that hyper-polished, overly measured cadence? You can spot it. Lefkoe pointed out that if you scroll through certain sports media accounts on X, their tone from three months ago compared to now feels like it came from a completely different person. And yet, no one is saying anything. Lefkoe doesn’t want to be the guy calling it out, but he’s clearly no fan of the practice, either.
At a certain point, it stops being about efficiency and starts raising questions about whether you have anything to say in the first place. That’s where Jones jumped in. The ex-ESPNer was not only baffled by the idea but also borderline offended.
“You can’t come up with a take by yourself?” asked Jones. “First of all, it ain’t gotta be long. There’s nothing dumber than giving it away for free in long form on the tweets in the first place. People ain’t got no attention span for all of that. No. No. Those people should be ashamed of themselves. I did not know that this was a thing.”
It’s a thing, alright. And Jones was genuinely bewildered that anyone in the business — especially those with platforms and followings — would resort to that level of outsourced opinion-making. And to Jones, it speaks to a staggering lack of self-confidence.
Suddenly, we’re in an era of sports media personalities who don’t trust their own voice enough to hit “post” without a chatbot holding their hand.
“I just had no idea anybody would engage in such dorked-out behavior,” Jones said.
This isn’t just about AI, though. It’s about not trusting your own voice, or perhaps not even having one to begin with. Sports media is supposed to be personality-driven. That’s the gig. If you need a chatbot to cook up your takes, what are we even doing here?
Lefkoe actually tested that theory for fun, feeding AI some prompts to mimic Jones himself. And yeah, it strung some sentences together, but it didn’t sound like Bomani Jones. It missed the nuance, the rhythm, the edge. Which kind of proves the point. If a bot can’t replicate someone as sharp and distinct as Jones, why would you ever hand over the keys and expect it to capture you?