TL;DR
- Angie Mentink, a Seattle Mariners broadcaster since 1997, went viral after someone photographed her using ChatGPT to brainstorm post-game interview questions.
- The pile-on started loud. The internet's response was louder... and the original post got deleted.
- She handled it with calm, humor, and zero apology: "I'm late to the AI party."
- Using AI to brainstorm doesn't replace 29 years of expertise. The experience just moves upstream, into knowing which ideas are worth keeping.
- If a stroke and cancer survivor is out there experimenting with new tools and calling it "always learning," the rest of us can probably stop acting like ChatGPT is a cheat code.
A fan snapped a photo. Angie Mentink, a longtime Seattle Mariners broadcaster, was standing on the sideline before a post-game interview. She had ChatGPT open on her phone. She was typing: "Good questions to ask after a loss to an MLB player."
That photo made it to X. Then Instagram. Then everywhere.
Some people laughed. A few tried to turn it into a story about AI replacing real journalists, or about her being underprepared, or about how embarrassing this was for a professional. The post that kicked off the pile-on was quietly deleted... because the pile-on went the other direction entirely.
Her response was the real story
Angie didn't go quiet. She didn't over-explain. Her first line was almost too good:
"I'm currently asking AI how to handle going viral for using AI."
Then she wrote a full response. She explained she'd been experimenting. Curious about what it could do. Comparing notes against her own prep. She said she'd been at this since 1997, that the industry has "come a long way from pen and paper," and she closed with: "Always learning."
That's it. No drama. No press release. No apology.
You can tell she's a pro just by how she handled it... and that's kind of the whole point.
Why the backlash doesn't hold up
She's been a Mariners broadcaster for 29 years. You don't think she knows what to ask a player after a tough loss? She's probably done that exact interview hundreds of times.
What she was doing with ChatGPT was almost certainly what a lot of us do: prep done, questions ready, and then... "I wonder what the AI would add to this." Curiosity. The same thing most people do when they have a draft in front of them and just want to see another angle.
That's not a red flag. That's how curious people work.
The whole frame of "she used AI, she must not know what she's doing" falls apart the second you think it through. You Googled to find your sources. You used a thesaurus when a word felt flat. You asked a colleague what they thought before a big meeting. None of that means you don't know your job.
And for context: she came back to that sideline after a serious stroke that temporarily paralyzed her. She's also a breast cancer survivor. The backlash hit a lot of people differently once that came out.
The expertise doesn't disappear when you use the tool
Here's where it gets interesting. Fantasy author Brandon Sanderson gave a talk called You Are the Art where he makes the case that the process of creating... the judgment calls, the "does this feel right," the what-to-keep and what-to-cut... is what makes someone the creator. The output is almost secondary.
He ran an actual test: he asked New York Times bestselling author friends to write a passage given a prompt, then also asked them to prompt an AI to write the same thing. He distributed both and asked readers to guess which was human and which was AI. >Nobody could reliably tell.
But here's what that actually means: the skilled author who prompted the AI well did so because they know what good writing looks like. The expertise didn't vanish. It just moved into the prompt... and into which suggestions they kept.
Same logic applies to Angie. If she knows what makes a great post-game question, she knows which ChatGPT suggestions to use and which ones to throw out. The 29 years don't disappear because she asked a robot for ideas. That experience is what filters the output.
If you're figuring out where AI fits in your own work, the AI tools checklist is a useful starting point for knowing what to actually try.
"Always learning" is the whole lesson
The internet had her back. Fans, media people, other broadcasters. The overwhelming reaction was: yeah, everyone uses tools, that's how it works, chill out.
What I keep coming back to is how she framed it. "I'm late to the AI party." Not defensive. Not a lecture. Just: I saw the thing, I tried it, I want to know what it does.
That's the right relationship with any new tool. You don't have to be the first person on it. You don't have to evangelize it. You just have to be willing to kick the tires without shame.
Twenty-nine years of experience and still curious. That's the move.