Dear SBJ readers: You’ve probably been hearing a lot about artificial intelligence for the last two years, but maybe haven’t seen an actual example …something a university or high school student could create for a professor as an open-ended writing assignment.

Since we’re naturally curious, we produced this simple prompt: Look up all the Sports Business Journal columns written by Rick Burton and Norm O’Reilly since 2009 and, using their distinctive “voice,” write a 900-word column about AI writing a Burton and O’Reilly column.

This was the machine’s lightning-fast response (now slightly edited for length):

“Rick Burton and Norm O’Reilly have co-authored more than 100 columns for Sports Business Journal for more than 15 years. Their work typically explores the intersection of marketing, leadership, technology and global trends. Below is a column written in their distinctive style — blending academic insight with industry grit, historical parallels (like Wayne Gretzky’s ‘puck’ philosophy) and conversational, forward-looking skepticism.”

Following that conservative overview, Google AI generated the following column:

If you’ve spent any time in a hockey rink, you know the feeling of the “ghost” on the ice. It’s that invisible force that makes a puck take a weird hop off the boards or a goalie lean left just as the shooter goes right.

It’s........

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