This winter, at the World Cup, Alexis Mac Allister made what was perhaps the most important pass of the tournament. It wasn’t the prettiest—though it was very pretty—and it wasn’t the most talked-about. But it was probably the most important.
Mac Allister could have taken the ball himself here, and he might have scored. He was 23 at the time, and I know plenty of of people that age—including me—who would have panicked and fired off a wild shot. But Alexis was calm, he knew where Di María was, and he put the ball directly on his foot for a golden chance.
Di María was visibly emotional after the goal, tears in his eyes. Argentina was 2-0 up before the half; for neutrals who had suddenly become enormous Argentina fans, things were looking up.
You know what happened next—France scored two before the end of regulation, both teams scored one in extra time, and a penalty shootout was needed to cap what was perhaps the greatest international final ever played. Argentina campeon del mundo.
It had turned out that Argentina didn’t just appreciate Mac Allister—they had needed him, and the goal, and the 116 minutes he played during the final.
Mac Allister turned 24 two days after the final, presumably still under the influence. What a few days.
The thing that always happens
Then, almost the minute the transfer window opened this summer, Mac Allister became a Liverpool player. I’ll save you all the details—Liverpool fans raging against the ownership group FSG, saying John Henry would never spend the £50M to sign him; the revelation that we’d got him on a very good (£35M) deal; the raging that we’d not spent more, that he would be our only signing.
All dust in the wind to Mac Allister, who is almost universally acknowledged to be an excellent signing.
This, it’s worth saying, is all right down the middle for a transfer, especially one after a World Cup. A young player, already playing for a slightly smaller club in the Premier League (Brighton, in Alexis’ case), has an excellent World Cup, showing he can perform in the most pressured situations. There was no more pressured situation for the Argentinians than trying to win the tournament for Messi, who’d been let down by so many Argentina squads. Then he earns a transfer to a bigger club.
Another usual thing happened, too: the new club’s fans began to think of a song for him. Here’s where things got strange.
The tweet
The tweet came from @aifootballsongs, a relatively inactive account which claims to ask AIs like ChatGPT to write football chants.
https://twitter.com/aifootballsongs/status/1666327376949657603
The song—click the link above—is everything a football chant should be: catchy, clever, singable to the tune of the 90s dance classic “Ecuador” by the German group Sash! It caught fire on the internet, even to the point that Liverpool’s own Twitter account teased Mac Allister’s announcement with the background music to the song.
Here are the lyrics, which I hope are sung at Anfield soon:
“Jürgen said ‘I seen ya, winning with Argentina
I need a centre mid too,’ and so he sent a bid through
And now we’ve got Alexis, Alexis is majestic,
Mac Allister is magic, he’s Red and it’s fantastic!”
Just one thing: ChatGPT almost certainly didn’t write the song.
For one thing, ChatGPT says itself that it doesn’t know about events after 2021, meaning that it doesn’t know that Argentina won the Copa America or the World Cup. For another, the style of the song is completely different than ChatGPT. Here’s what I get when I type @aifootballsongs’ exact request into the engine.
And when I ask it to choose “Ecuador” specifically?
Plus there’s the anecdotal and circumstantial evidence: @aifootballsongs’ account—without a very deep catalog—starts with their own song, a parody of Hamilton.
None of this affects the chant, of course—I’m happier that this is very probably an original composition by someone who is very probably a Liverpool fan. The third line, which rhymes “magic,” “majestic” and “fantastic” in quick succession, is metrically beautiful and perfect. Plus, it tells the story of Alexis, at least as we know him so far.
So why, I ask, does the author of the chant want us to think that a robot wrote it? Is it the virality the idea might engender? Is is the hilarious (terrifying) idea that ChatGPT would be able to do this sort of thing? Is it the robot voice—a capability that ChatGPT doesn’t actually have—that sings along?
AI
The strange truth is that we’re entering a period of time where it may look cooler—more useful, more appealing, more marketable—to have manipulated a computer to look like a human than to be human ourselves. I frequently hear people talk about the creators of, say, ChatGPT as though they were artists. And, in a way, they may be. But the other truth is that large language models like ChatGPT simply collect, aggregate, and average out what we as humans write and say. Their job—literally—is the remove the most interesting, most fringe, most experimental cases in the pursuit of something obviously “correct” and, therefore, totally uninteresting.
My praise to the author of this song; I am almost sure the song has an author. If I’m wrong, please tell me so; if ChatGPT wrote this, then may God help us all. And now we have Alexis, Alexis is majestic, Mac Allister is magic, he’s Red and it’s fantastic!