SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — In one potential use of technology in the sports world, companies are now experimenting with artificial intelligence to provide sports commentary.
ABC7 reporter JR Stone recently got an inside look at an IBM table tennis machine equipped with generative AI that tracks a player’s playing ability, which was on display at Dreamforce 2024 in San Francisco.
The same technology was used at Wimbledon and the US Open.
“This is the first year that we’ve introduced a generative AI component that can actually create match commentary and match summaries based on all the data that’s collected,” IBM’s Nick Otto said.
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The data includes average ball speed, swing speed, forehand shots, backhand shots and more.
To test the idea, Stone went head-to-head with Otto in a game of ping pong, ultimately winning 11-7.
The AI produced the following summary:
“Nick’s arms must have felt like a whirlwind as he spun the ball at an average speed of 8.45 mph. JR tried to keep up, but his 30 forehand shots and 5.56 mph swing speed were no match for him.”
UCLA professor Ramesh Srinivasan believes caution is needed with this type of technology to ensure humanity still benefits.
“This is incredibly exciting and astonishing, but also concerning in terms of what this means for actual journalists and human commentators,” Srinivasan said.
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The US Open recently used AI commentators for smaller matches, but Otto said the technology hasn’t taken over the jobs of human commentators.
“But not every game had an announcer, so we actually produced and were the only announcer for a lot of games,” Otto said.
While we only had a written review of the Ping Pong setup, the idea of an AI system gaining all of its knowledge in real time, or near real time, could be a harbinger of what’s to come next.
IBM officials said the company’s generative AI systems are also being used to collect data for human commentators, resulting in highly detailed statistics in new categories that had not been tracked before.
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