In Aspen, an iconic resort in Colorado and scene of the X Games starting this Thursday, January 23, the judges will carefully monitor the athletes participating in these Extreme Sports World Championships. Throughout the weekend, they will scrutinize each pirouette, each “flip” and each “grab”, as has been customary since the first edition in 1997. But this year, another referee is joining the panel: the artificial intelligence. During some snowboard competitions, video cameras will film each athlete’s movements, which will then be analyzed by AI. Finally, the computer is tasked with assigning their scores to the athletes.
The X Games is the first professional sporting event to officially test AI. This is a test, however: this weekend, human judges will have the final say in deciding official scores and medals. Viewers will also see the ratings given by the AI and will be able to play the comparison game.
“Super power”
Jeremy Bloom, CEO of the X Games, sees artificial intelligence as a “super power” for these scoring sports, which necessarily leave room for subjectivity. “I would say that humans make mistakes sometimes. That’s not to say that AI won’t make mistakes too, especially in its initial form, but our goal is to give this tool to judges so they can use it in their booth. slipped on Wednesday this former freestyle skier once crowned world champion in New York Times.
Jeremy Bloom also highlights the difference in precision between the human eye and the acuity offered by AI and its cameras, particularly when it is necessary to determine which exact figure a snowboarder has just executed, or how many turns on himself he just realized.
-“Sometimes we make mistakes in the figures because they turn very quickly”underlined Jeremy Bloom, again with the New York daily. The computer model tested in Aspen, because it can dissect the video in slow motion, could prove less fallible than the human eye.
Scoring disciplines have so far remained outside of AI’s incursion into sport. But if the X Games experience proves conclusive, synchronized swimming, surfing or even boxing, whose judging system is often called into question, could in turn be tempted. However, it remains difficult to imagine, at least in the short term, the expulsion of referees from competitions.
