EP 49: ChatGPT Predicts the 2024 College Basketball Tournament Brackets

Transcript for this Episode:

INTRODUCTION VOICEOVER: Dive into the world of innovation with us as we unravel the challenges, breakthroughs, and latest trends that are shaping our digital landscape. This is Tech UNMUTED, your guide to the tech revolution.

GEORGE: Welcome to an exciting episode of Tech UNMUTED. Tonight, we're going to take a look at using ChatGPT to predict the college basketball outcomes that just got released tonight. It's Sunday night, about 7:30. Finally got a PDF we could load into ChatGPT. We actually ran it already, so we're going to show the results of it on the screen. We did our best to double-check that it actually ran through it the way it should run through.

I do want to hit something before we dive into this, which is, the information and predictions shared are for entertainment and educational purposes only and are not intended for betting advice or guaranteed outcomes. Our discussions, including the use of team names or trademarks, are for descriptive purposes only without any endorsement or affiliation. The hosts, producers, and affiliates of this podcast bear no liability for decisions made based on our content.

We encourage you to be responsible in your consumption of this material, acknowledging that any action taken by our listeners are at their own risk. If gambling becomes a concern, seek help promptly.

SANTI: Yes, in other words, this is for fun. [laughs] We've done this before. What we're really trying to do here is we want to put artificial intelligence to the test, and what we want to see, is we want to see how well artificial intelligence can analyze data. [laughs]

GEORGE: Nobody wants to hear that anymore. They just want to see the answers.

SANTI: All right, let's do it. Walk us through how we got to this, because it was-

GEORGE: How I got this, the paid version of ChatGPT, it's GPT-4, I loaded in a bracket that came from CBS Sports' website. It's a PDF. It's actually important to do a PDF and not an image. We tried an image, and it had a hard time figuring out what was on the actual image. There's a couple of things. I'm not going to read the entire prompt, but I pointed out that there were play in games because in the first go-around, it didn't figure that out.

I pointed out who was playing who in the final game, which regions they came from, because again, first time around, playing around with it, it didn't figure it out. I just set it loose with the prompt. I said, look for some upsets, those kinds of things, and I did specifically indicate who the playing games were. We're not going into a ton of detail on this, but it came back and said, "Hey, I can try to predict the outcomes. It's using historical data. This may not be easy or not. Here's some things you should know. There's 5 versus 12, are common upsets, as well as a 4 versus 13."

Then it starts to drill down and do the predictions, so it did first-round predictions, which is really the play in game. We're going to drop all of these into the description. You'll get a running list of this. The commentary that's in there, where it says things like this whole section up top here, we don't have enough space. There's a 5,000-character limit, so we won't drop it in.

SANTI: Folks just want to know what the prediction is, and so we're going to make sure that's available for you. There's your first four predictions. Now, granted, this is AI looking at what, historical data, current team performance, and taking all the other data available out there into account and coming up with its own potential predictions. There it is.

GEORGE: It looks at seeding and some other things.

SANTI: It does.

GEORGE: At least it said it did.

SANTI: Correct. [laughs] It says.

GEORGE: It did identify a couple of places for potential upsets. We did spot-check one of these. It was five v four. Not sure I'd call that an upset, but it called it an upset. It goes through then East, West, Midwest, South in the first round.

SANTI: Very nice.

GEORGE: I don't think there's any other upsets indicated there except for that one. This bracket makes for potentially an uninteresting bracket going in. Then it goes through subsequent rounds. It starts to look at and think about what comes next, where there's potential upsets, those kinds of things. Then it gives, again, some of the strategies for predicting higher seeds generally progress, but watch out for 5 versus 12 and 4 versus 13. I think it said that off the top.

It did stop working after that and it paused effectively and said, "Do you want to continue?" I said, "Keep going." Then it goes into the round of 32.

SANTI: I found interesting that it just stopped. You had to prompt it to start up again. I just found that interesting. All right, so then it went to the next round.

GEORGE: Round of 32. Again, it's got a potential upset. Gonzaga versus Kansas. That might be the five versus four. That is the five versus four. Then it keeps rolling through. It gets down to sweet 16. Does each of the East, the West, the Midwest, and South. Kept going. When it was running live, took five, six minutes. Again, we tried a couple of variations on doing this and it failed a couple of times. That's why we weren't actually doing it live right on the screen.

SANTI: Correct, it took a while to get to this. I will make a comment though. While you were doing this, behind the scenes, I was taking screenshots of the bracket and feeding it into Copilot. I'll just tell you that the elite eight predictions that you have here were also predicted by Copilot, meaning UConn and Houston ultimately ended up going. That was interesting to me.

GEORGE: We see it gets down to the final four. Here's the thing everybody's looking for, it's predicting Arizona versus Purdue and Arizona is a winner by four. Keep in mind this is-- Hey, you never know, but this is likely a middle of the road prediction. It's aggregating data year after year after year. What you're going to get is probably the more generic output. You're going to have higher seed winning most cases. I would suspect is what this did.

SANTI: Maybe, but again, it was just interesting. Although we know that Copilot uses ChatGPT-4, behind the scenes, it has its own parameters. I was only able to finish two of the quadrants. I did get Houston and UConn. It does seem to be predicting the same. I could always go back and finish my Copilot experiment. As far as what ChatGPT produced, Copilot seemed to be on the same track. That was very interesting to me.

GEORGE: I'll read this last paragraph because it is a little bit interesting.

SANTI: It is interesting.

GEORGE: This prediction model favors Arizona to win the national championship with a final score of 86 versus 82 for Purdue. This model is considered historical performance in seeds potential upsets. Recent team performances to predict the outcome of each game. Remember that the beauty of March basketball is its unpredictability. While these predictions are based on patterns and data, actual results can vary significantly. I'm quite sure we will see upsets in the first round that have not been predicted here.

SANTI: Of course. Of course. I love that ChatGPT finished with that because that has been our message every time you and I do this. Is like AI going to analyze specifically what? Patterns and data. It's going to do it at lightning speed. [laughs] It would take us forever to do this. It does it rather quickly. This is random data. We have no idea. AI can't ultimately predict, but it can look at patterns and data and come up with its prediction. Basically, ChatGPT just populated its bracket. That's what it ended up doing.

I hope this demonstrates really what we've been saying for a while now, is that AI is going to be probably one of the most useful tools. We've been doing it for fun. We did the lottery a couple of times. We'll do more stuff like this where it challenges the AI. What we really want to drive home is this is not the tool of the future. This is the tool now. [laughs] We are using this right now to do something fun, which predicts the basketball bracket.

Think about all the different applications. When you start seeing all the different ways we, George and I, start tinkering with AI, it should start triggering in your mind, "Wow, wait a minute, if they can do this with this data, what can I do with this other set of data?" This is really what we're hoping to drive home. The ability to use AI to its peak performance. Push it, push it as far as it'll let you push because we want to really see what it can do.

Now, we will be, I guess, providing all these data, all these predictions down in a description. Also, we really, really really, want to see your comments so that you guys can also play along with us. We will be tracking as the games go on through the comment section. Again, we're going to have fun with our audience. We'll be tracking, see how well ChatGPT did in their predictions. Please engage with us in the comments. Let's see what happens. We'll have a blast doing this for the next several weeks.

This does bring this podcast to an end. Stay tuned, we want to see your comments. Let's see who wins. Maybe if ChatGPT actually picks the ultimate winner, we can do a recap or something. Until next time, folks play responsibly. See you soon.

CLOSING VOICEOVER: Thanks for diving into the tech world with us today. Don't forget to subscribe and hit the bell icon to never miss an episode of Tech UNMUTED. Stay curious, stay connected.

PREDICTIONS:

Here are the predictions.

First Four Predictions:
Howard (68) vs. Wagner (63)
Montana St (72) vs. Grambling (65)
Virginia (70) vs. Colorado St (64)
Boise St (75) vs. Colorado (70)

Round of 64 Predictions:

East:
UConn (85) vs. Stetson (60)
FAU (78) vs. Northwestern (74)
San Diego St. (76) vs. UAB (70) Potential Upset
Auburn (82) vs. Yale (68)
BYU (79) vs. Duquesne (73)
Illinois (88) vs. Morehead St. (64)
Wash. St. (80) vs. Drake (77)
Iowa St. (84) vs. S. Dak. St. (70)

West:
N. Carolina (86) vs. Howard (64)
Miss. St. (75) vs. Michigan St. (72)
Saint Mary's (78) vs. Grand Canyon (73)
Alabama (85) vs. Charleston (68)
Clemson (77) vs. New Mexico (70)
Baylor (83) vs. Colgate (65)
Dayton (76) vs. Nevada (73)
Arizona (89) vs. LBSU (67)

South:
Houston (87) vs. Longwood (61)
Nebraska (72) vs. Texas A&M (70)
Wisconsin (76) vs. James Madison (69)
Duke (84) vs. Vermont (70)
Texas Tech (75) vs. NC State (72)
Kentucky (86) vs. Oakland (65)
Florida (74) vs. Boise St. (70)
Marquette (88) vs. W. Kentucky (68)

Midwest:
Purdue (90) vs. Montana St. (62)
Utah St. (78) vs. TCU (75)
Gonzaga (85) vs. McNeese (64)
Kansas (83) vs. Samford (69)
S. Carolina (77) vs. Oregon (74)
Creighton (81) vs. Akron (67)
Texas (79) vs. Virginia (73)
Tennessee (87) vs. St. Peter's (65)

Round of 32 Predictions:

East:
UConn (80) vs. FAU (74)
San Diego St. (75) vs. Auburn (79)
BYU (77) vs. Illinois (82)
Wash. St. (75) vs. Iowa St. (80)

West:
N. Carolina (82) vs. Miss. St. (76)
Saint Mary's (74) vs. Alabama (82)
Clemson (72) vs. Baylor (78)
Dayton (73) vs. Arizona (85)

South:
Houston (82) vs. Nebraska (70)
Wisconsin (72) vs. Duke (78)
Texas Tech (71) vs. Kentucky (77)
Florida (73) vs. Marquette (80)

Midwest:
Purdue (85) vs. Utah St. (73)
Gonzaga (80) vs. Kansas (82) Potential Upset
S. Carolina (70) vs. Creighton (76)
Texas (75) vs. Tennessee (82)

Sweet 16 Predictions:

East:
UConn (82) vs. Auburn (78)
Illinois (80) vs. Iowa St. (76)

West:
N. Carolina (80) vs. Alabama (83)
Baylor (75) vs. Arizona (81)

South:
Houston (84) vs. Duke (80)
Kentucky (79) vs. Marquette (75)

Midwest:
Purdue (88) vs. Kansas (82)
Creighton (74) vs. Tennessee (80)

Elite 8 Predictions:

East:
UConn (81) vs. Illinois (78)

West:
Alabama (79) vs. Arizona (83)

South:
Houston (82) vs. Kentucky (78)

Midwest:
Purdue (85) vs. Tennessee (81)

Final Four Predictions:

East vs. West:
UConn (78) vs. Arizona (82)

Midwest vs. South:
Purdue (83) vs. Houston (80)

Disclaimer: The information and predictions shared here are for entertainment and educational purposes only and are not intended as betting advice or a guarantee of outcomes. Our discussions, including the use of team names or trademarks, are for descriptive purposes only, without any endorsement or affiliation. The hosts, producers, and affiliates of this podcast bear no liability for decisions made based on our content. We encourage responsible consumption of our material, acknowledging that any actions taken by our listeners are at their own risk and discretion. If gambling becomes a concern, seek help promptly.

Episode Credits:

Produced by: Fusion Connect

Citations:

Printable Men's NCAA Tournament Bracket Print Your 2024 March Madness Bracket from CBSSports.com