How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love AI — Experiment 2

The One Where AI Helps You Bluff Your Way Through Sports Conversations

There's a special kind of social anxiety that comes with being the only person in a room who doesn't follow sports. The familiar scene of a group of colleagues or friends huddled together, passionately dissecting last night's match. While you just stand there, nodding along, thinking about how you spent the same evening chasing your dog around the house while she had her nightly zoomies. (Way better use of time, IMO.)

The thing about sports conversations is that they're rarely just about sports. They're social currency. Often, they're how bonds are formed, deals are struck, and friendships are cemented. And if you're someone who wouldn't know an LBW from a wide ball (are those even from the same sport?), you might find yourself feeling left out.

This particular AI experiment was born from one too many awkward moments of me trying to contribute to heated sports discussions with groundbreaking observations like "Did you see that ludicrous display last night?" (1,000 points if you got that IT Crowd reference.)

Enter SportsBluff — my second venture into the world of AI-assisted development. It's your personal sports conversation coach, powered by artificial intelligence and Reddit's passionate sports communities. It scours through the latest sports discussions, understands what people are actually talking about (not just the scores), and gives you convenient, contextually appropriate conversation starters that make you sound like you actually watched the game instead of binge-watching *Breaking Bad* for the third time.

The Technical Journey

Building SportsBluff turned out to be an exercise in finding the right data source. The challenge seemed simple enough: find a reliable source of sports data that was either free or very affordable. That shouldn't be hard, right? Sports fans love to talk about sports online. And yet, it was definitely not an easy fix.

My first thought was RSS feeds. They're free, they're everywhere, and most sports websites have them. Well, that turned out to be a dead end. Half the feeds were outdated, the other half were broken, and the ones that actually worked provided inconsistent data.

So then I pinned my hopes on sports APIs. These were better-structured, reliable, and some were even affordable. But they lacked personality. They'd tell you that Team A beat Team B by X points (runs? baskets?), but they couldn't capture the drama, the emotion, or the memorable moments that people actually talk about.

News APIs seemed promising at first. After all, sports journalists know how to tell a story. But they too fell short, often being either too formal or too focused on the bigger picture rather than the moments people discuss over coffee.

Then came the breakthrough, courtesy of a friend who's a massive basketball fan. I tried to ask where he went online to discuss the sport, and he casually mentioned getting most of his NBA updates from Reddit. That was the lightbulb moment. Reddit was perfect. It had everything: up-to-the-minute updates, real fans using real language, and most importantly, the kind of conversational snippets that actually come up in honest sports discussions. Nobody at the water cooler is talking about player efficiency ratings; they're talking about that controversial referee decision or that memorable celebration.

Getting approved for Reddit's API was its own challenge, but eventually, I got it working. Combined with GPT-4o-mini for generating the casual and natural-sounding conversation points, SportsBluff finally became what I'd envisioned: a tool that could help the sports-challenged among us navigate these conversations confidently.

The result? A web app that helps you navigate sports conversations with just enough knowledge to be dangerous. It gives you three types of responses for any recent sporting event:

• The Vague Expert (for when you want to sound knowledgeable without committing to any actual facts)

• The Specific Reference (for when you need to prove you actually "watched" the game)

• The Exit Strategy (for when the conversation gets too detailed and you need a graceful way out)

Like all my AI experiments, SportsBluff was built with more enthusiasm than expertise and no commercial aspirations. It's just a fun little tool born from what I think is a universal human experience. The fact that it works by combining the passionate discussions of Reddit sports fans with an AI that helps you navigate these conversations feels... somehow appropriate.

Want to try it yourself? Whether you're preparing for a client meeting where you know sports will come up, or just want to contribute something other than "go sports!" to the next office discussion, you can find SportsBluff at this link.

Next up in this series: How I accidentally became an AI art curator while trying to organise my MidJourney experiments. Because sometimes the best projects start with "I wonder if..."

Watch this space!