Artificial intelligence will affect sport on and off the field – Publinews – 2024-03-05 15:01:08

BOSTON (AP) — The many advanced analyzes in sports are about to encounter a formidable rival that surpasses them: artificial intelligence.

The people who killed the sacrifice bunt in baseball and turned NBA games into 3-point contests aren’t sure what will happen when artificial intelligence invades the sport, both in team management and on the playing field. .

“I’ve been in computer science for a long time. This is the first thing we don’t understand,” Philadelphia 76ers president Daryl Morey said Friday during the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.

“It’s something that drives you crazy,” he added. “We’ve actually created something now with zeros and ones, where we create more things with each step, but we don’t understand the results.”

The MIT conference usually brings together thousands of “nerds” experienced in the deep analysis of sports statistics, who apply their data models to hot topics such as diversity, betting or how to reverse the slow pace of baseball games. .

But this year’s meeting definitely focused on artificial intelligence. The roundtables and papers presented addressed the potential for generative artificial intelligence to transform sports.

One conversation focused on baseball strategy, another on how to provide Olympic content for more than 200 countries competing in almost fifty different sports. And one research paper used artificial intelligence to track player data from a football broadcast.

Morey, one of the founders of the conference, participated in a panel called “Winning with Artificial Intelligence: The Future of Artificial Intelligence in Sports.” The discussion addressed the potential for improvements in scheduling, player safety, advertising, ticket sales and broadcasts that turn the action on the field into a Disney cartoon.

Kevin Lopes, vice president of development and innovation at ESPN, compared artificial intelligence to the iPhone, which transformed daily life by giving everyone with some coding skills the opportunity to come up with their own apps.

“I think about that when I think about generative artificial intelligence,” Lopes said. “I don’t think anyone knows what it is yet. It’s fascinating to me, and it’s going to be the next big thing. “We exist in this historical moment… where every day we will see innovations in artificial intelligence.”

Let no one make a mistake. Artificial intelligence is already here.

Carlos Peña, former Dominican player and current commentator, says that artificial intelligence can be used to help a hitter eliminate his blind spots. But he warns that baseball players will balk unless you take all the math out of it and offer it as a simple guide, something like: “Look at the fastball high and in.”

Peña anticipated complaints from scouts and others that analysis cannot replace intuition.

“That’s not what we’re trying to do here,” he said. “What we try to do is improve intuition.”

Christopher Jackson, head of digital data and analytics for the Olympics, said artificial intelligence can help create content for the Web to appeal to fans of sports that aren’t as popular or often garnered attention. mainstream media.

One problem is that Olympic planning is measured in decades, while big changes in artificial intelligence come every six months.

Julie Souza, global director of Amazon Web Services, said the NFL is saving $2 million a year by using artificial intelligence for its calendar, in which there are 10,000 trillion (correct in Spanish, a one followed by 15 zeros). of potential options that should take into account holidays, shared stadiums and travel.

Artificial intelligence is already dissecting which plays and even which body poses are most likely to cause injuries in a game, he said.

“The rules change to make this sport safer and the players are more protected,” Souza commented.

“It’s not just the NFL that benefits from this,” he said. “We are not going back. There is no way to reverse this. We are simply learning more and making the game safer. “What’s great not only for the league but for us as fans is having our players more time on the field.”

Morey said the 76ers use artificial intelligence for productivity purposes — speeding up routine tasks. However, this is not yet so accurate as to surpass humans, at a time when attempts are being made to improve the predictive model.

“We haven’t found as much here, but that will change,” he warned.

And they will keep trying.

“There are a lot of things that scare us about this, but it is happening,” Morey said. “There’s not going to be a way to do the whole security thing… There’s not really going to be a way to control this. You have to just lean on this, honestly, to help your business and support what you do. And you might run into something that scares you. But what is the alternative? Don’t join? Has no sense”.