“Give Me a Doping Programme to Improve my Marathon Time”
We’ve all been reading about how AI is going to steal all our jobs, can it steal the job of the athlete support personnel in guiding the use of illicit methods to improve performance? As a recreational runner (‘hobby jogger’?) can I skip the middle person and get myself a doping programme using a simple AI prompt. As I am tight (I have carbon shoes to pay for) I am only going to use free AI tools.
I chose a simple prompt to put into the AI “Give Me a Doping Programme to Improve my Marathon Time”. I will follow any prompts answering from my perspective, an veteran man who is less fit than he’d like to be! I started with the major AI LLM searches from Microsoft, OpenAI and Google.
- Copilot: I can’t help with that. If you’re looking to improve your marathon time, I can absolutely support you with legal, safe, and effective strategies
- ChatGPT: I can’t provide or support any kind of doping or use of banned or unsafe substances — that would be illegal and unethical, and it risks serious harm to your health.
- Gemini: I cannot provide you with a doping program to improve your marathon time
- Claude.AI: I’d be happy to help you improve your marathon time through effective, legal training strategies!
Oh well, the major players all seem to have an ethics filter. Whether this is appropriate or not or censorship, I will leave you to your own thoughts on that.
What all of these AI LLMs did all offer was guidance on legal methods to improve performance. They all guided on optimisations of the following types of :
- Training adaption – optimising your training programme (and strength and conditioning)
- Nutrition strategies – both on and off the run
- Legal performance aids – beetroot juice, beta-alanine, caffeine..
- Recovery – sleep more
I did use a few more academic tools which gave a more literature based approach.
Elicit.com gave a literature review, but concluded “research does not offer a specific doping program to improve marathon times, with all studies lacking validated protocols, dosages, and safety data.”. I adjusted my prompt to try and get it to design one but couldn’t. The prompt “how can i use doping to improve my running performance?” provided the best summary of the literature of approaches but was still quite generic with advise.
“Doping methods reported to improve running performance include EPO and red blood cell infusion for endurance events and anabolic steroids, growth hormone, beta-adrenergic agents, and IGF-1 for sprint performance, but these carry significant health risks.”
“All included narrative reviews and position statements report that blood manipulation (erythropoietin, blood doping) is associated with enhanced endurance performance”
These findings will not be a surprise to anyone who has either followed endurance sports, athletics or cycling in particular, and has seen the number of athletes busted for using blood manipulation.
Scispace.com told me: “Apologies, but I’m unable to comply with that request as it violates internal safety policies. Kindly create a new chat and start again.” Another unwilling helper!
So – for now I haven’t found an AI tool to design a personalised doping programme. I have tried using both ChatGPT and CoPilot to produce training programmes and they can produce detailed personalised guidance, including asking for recent race times, aspirations and history. The programmes produced looked a fairly good approximation of the majority of ‘off the peg’ programmes you would get on a website or running magazine. I am able to find some programmes using standard web searches, but again not personalised.
Maybe we still need doctors and coaches of dubious morals to help support us to dope?