Paris gives first glimpse at AI's Olympic future
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NBC is tapping an AI version of broadcaster Al Michaels to deliver personalized Olympic highlights from the Paris Games. Photo: NBC Sports
Artificial intelligence is making its presence felt at the Paris Games, but mostly in a supporting role.
Our thought bubble: While it is tempting to cast this year as "The first AI Olympics," it's more accurate to think of it as the last Games in which the technology remains confined to the sidelines.
Driving the news: A number of Olympic partners are using the games to show off new AI initiatives, from chatbots for athletes to machine learning-generated performance recommendations to helping athletes get a better night's sleep in the Olympic Village.
The big picture: The International Olympic Committee laid out a broad Olympic AI Agenda, which outlines a series of principles — but not the specifics — for the role it envisions for the technology.
Between the lines: AI holds huge potential for helping teams and athletes gain insights into their performance and adjust their training accordingly.
- A number of professional and amateur sports use AI — particularly machine learning — to help sort and categorize footage and to offer areas for improvement.
Yes, but: Artificial intelligence is expensive, running the risk that its adoption will widen the divide between the rich countries that already dominate the medal count and the rest of the world.
- That's only one of many risks that the IOC highlighted in its AI agenda.
Zoom in: Many of the companies that have forked over billions to be the Games' official sponsors are looking to demonstrate leadership in the burgeoning field.
Intel — the games' official AI partner — is using AI to power a chatbot for athletes and to help broadcasters chop the footage (for which they have paid dearly) into ever more pieces to be consumed by fans of a particular country, sport or athlete.
- Intel has also launched a pilot program with the IOC in Senegal (a country that has won only a single medal) to help use AI to identify potential athletes in five of the country's villages. Intel says it scanned more than 1,000 children, identifying 40 as having "significant talent."
- A scaled-down version of that system will be on display in Paris, allowing fans at the Stade de France to mimic various Olympic events, with an AI system evaluating their form and talent.
Omega, the official timekeeper of the games, isn't relying on AI to decide who won or lost but has found other ways to incorporate the technology, Alain Zobrist, CEO of Omega Timing, told reporters last week.
- Omega is using a range of cameras and sensors to track the movements of swimmers and then it's using computer vision and AI to understand acceleration, deceleration, number of strokes, and time in the water. This allows for detailed performance analysis.
- In tennis, computer vision is helping understand athletes' reaction time to serves and how this correlates with the quality of their returns.
Broadcaster NBC, meanwhile, is using AI to allow a digital version of Al Michaels to deliver personalized highlights as part of a daily recap to fans.
- "When I was approached about this, I was skeptical but obviously curious," Michaels said in an NBC Sports press release. "Then I saw a demonstration detailing what they had in mind. I said, 'I'm in.'"
By contrast, Warner Bros. Discovery, which holds broadcast rights in Europe, says it decided not to make use of AI for Paris.
- "We've yet to truly flesh out how AI is going to benefit the way in which we tell the story of live sport and of an athlete competing," Warner Bros. Discovery Sports executive Scott Young told IBC 365.
- "I don't think it's too far off, and I'm quite sure AI will have a much more impactful role at LA '28, but AI is not a driving force of technology for us at Paris 2024."
Airweave, the Japanese maker of the modular plastic mattresses that sit atop the cardboard bed frames in the Olympic Village, is offering an AI body scan to help athletes determine the ideal level of firmness for each of the mattresses' three segments.
- Despite the high-tech scans, the beds are still receiving mixed reviews from athletes.
The other side: Not everyone sees AI as the panacea for Olympic-size challenges. Getty Images, which produces millions of photos during the games, has invested in underwater robots and private 5G networks, but is still trying to identify a role for AI in its editorial operations.
- "We're always looking to see how we can do it ethically," said Michael Heiman, Getty's VP of global sport.
- The area with the biggest potential is using facial recognition to help identify which athlete is in a particular photo — a process that today often requires a photographer to verbally indicate an athlete's start position or bib number, which can then be matched with official records.
- Heiman said that facial recognition might work today in a professional league with a relatively modest number of players, but isn't yet ready to identify the faces of thousands of less well-known athletes.
Go deeper: I spoke to NPR's "Here & Now" about the use of AI at the Paris Games.
