AS I SEE IT COLUMN: AI’s increasing impact on sport

AI, the abbreviation for Artificial Intelligence, is omnipresent in our lives. We encounter it frequently in our everyday life and in the media we frequently see red flag warnings about the dangers of AI.

It has replaced human receptionists at many businesses. AI manages our online searches, tracks weather patterns, monitors traffic conditions in our navigation apps, translates text into other languages in almost real time; in short, AI is everywhere.

And now, AI has entered the realm of sports.

Exhibit A – If you’re a baseball fan, you’ve seen the square strike zone on your TV screen. With the help of 16 cameras, Major League Baseball (MLB) has instituted a system called ABS, where balls and strikes are called based on a player’s height that has been pre-programmed into the system.

Exhibit B – If you’re a tennis fan, you’ve seen the way AI is used to determine if a ball is in or out, with fancy graphics to make it perfectly clear where the ball has landed. The AI system in tennis is called Hawkeye and has been around for a while.

Exhibit C – In 2024, AI was used to unofficially referee a boxing match that sought to unify the world heavyweight title. The AI judge had nearly the exact same score as the three human judges.

Exhibit D – In the NBA, you will soon see AI used to help the refs make objective calls like whether or not a player has stepped out of bounds. The subjective calls will still be made by human refs.

Exhibit E – This is a crazy story. A bunch of researchers used AI and machine learning to build a robot and program it to throw basketball free throws. The robot was so good, it set a Guinness Book of World Records for shooting 2,000 consecutive free throws without a miss. The final record could have been a lot higher but researchers had to stop the test because they needed to get some sleep and the robot was sinking all of its shots.

The footage is easy to find online and is hysterical to watch because it never makes a mistake, ever.

Exhibit F – This story has to be seen to be believed. Robots can now beat pro athletes in legitimate table tennis matches. A ping-pong ball is one of the fastest moving objects in all of sports, and to see a robotic arm play against a professional table tennis player at top speed is something to behold.

Exhibit G – And just a few weeks ago, an AI robot named Lightning set a new world record for the 100-metre dash. Lightning ran the 100m faster than Usain Bolt. Bolt’s record of 9.58 seconds stood for 17 years, until Lightning ran the 100m in 9.32 seconds.

I strongly encourage you to head to YouTube to see the free throw robot, the table tennis robot and the robotic/humanoid sprinter in action. There isn’t enough space here to even begin to describe how unbelievably crazy it is to see a robot shooting a basketball, playing elite table tennis and running the 100m.

You will soon see more AI in more sports. It’s coming to half-pipe freestyle skiing, figure skating and many other sports. Whether you love it or hate it, AI will play an ever-increasing role in sport.

Hopefully the NHL will follow suit and turn to AI to help speed up games. We’ve all seen games delayed for a long time when officials are trying to determine if a play where a goal has been scored was actually offside.

TV has a couple of angles but it’s often not enough when plays are literally too close to call. Time for the NHL to bring things up several notches. Put multiple cameras on the boards, a sensor in the puck and have some kind of a sensor in player’s skate blades (they already have sensors sewn into their jerseys). With that kind of technology AI would instantly be able to determine if the play was offside or not. The game would be much faster without those long delays.