Sunday’s Premier League tie between Manchester United and Liverpool has been the talk of the Football World, and the reason for it has all to do with the astounding score-line.
After a strongly-contested first half that saw the Reds pull ahead right near the end, many expected United to stage a comeback in the second 45.
These expectations were far from unfounded, as Erik Ten Hag’s side have proven their resilience on numerous occasions this season.
But against Liverpool, United were forced into far too many mistakes, they conceded a second goal just 2 minutes after the restart, which was followed up by the third just a few minutes later.
The Red Devils looked dejected and out of ideas, and the home side made full use of their despondency.
Liverpool slotted in 4 more goals, taking the final goal-tally to 7-0, and handing United a humiliation in the process.
Following the defeat, there was radio silence from the Red Devils’ camp. And aside from the post-match thoughts of Ten Hag, none of the players offered their two cents on what happened.
That is until United talisman Marcus Rashford tweeted out a consoling letter to the fans, he touched upon the embarrassing result and asked the fans to ‘trust the process’.
I wish we could play a game today to try and put things right. The result is the result, and we can’t see past that! We must not let it define our season. We have to trust the process and stick together.
An apologetic paragraph from the forward is far from a rare occurrence, in recent years, the Red Devils have suffered quite a bit of hardship, and in an effort to communicate with the disappointed fanbase, Rashford has deployed many of these so-called ‘essays’.
While most were accepted or brushed off as excuses, fans seemed to be particularly interested in this one, and soon, they crafted a theory around the origins of the apology letter.
It’s unclear what brought this on, but users online suggested that England International created the message using the popular chatbot ChatGPT.
For the uninitiated, ChatGPT is an AI chatbot developed by OpenAi, the free-to-use application takes input from the user and churns out content as per given instructions using its vast database for reference.
The chatbot is incredibly capable, since its release, people have used it to write scripts, standups, college essays, letters and much more.
Needless to say, creating an apologetic paragraph would be easy work for the application, which is exactly what fans seemed to suggest after coming across Rashford’s tweet.
Under his replies, a number of screenshots popped up, all supposedly captured in the chatbot with the final result matching the exact statement tweeted out by Rashford.
For the sake of curiosity, we went ahead and tested out the inputs for ourselves, but ultimately, we couldn’t generate the same response. Of course, there is the possibility that other inputs were also added to generate the statement, but that’s rather unlikely.
In conclusion, the ChatGPT screenshots were almost definitely edited, although it’s easy to see why fans ran with this angle in the first place.
Rashford’s tweet was just so painfully generic that it might as well have been written by a robot.
It fails to address the game itself at all, the use of buzzwords such as ‘trust the process’ doesn’t help either, plus the sentiment just comes off as artificial.
Nevertheless, all signs point towards the paragraph being the Englishman’s own words, although we aren’t entirely sure of that being the better outcome.
