12 Jul 2024
The Wimbledon Championships have seen a dramatic increase in the use of AI both on- and off-court this year, with a partnership between the AELTC and IBM and social media monitoring services from the Signify Group.
AI at the Championship includes:
🔹 Generative AI reporting service ‘Catch Me Up’
🔹 Generative AI match preview and review service ‘Slamtracker’
🔹 AI-generated spoken commentary on highlight reels and closed captions
🔹 AI-generated player performance analysis, match outcome predictions and draw analysis via ‘Match Insights’
🔹 Social media monitoring service for players to flag harmful content
To admit some interest here, I was privileged to attend Wimbledon for a full day of Centre Court action last week as a guest of the All England Lawn Tennis Club, so I got to see the IBM exhibition space first-hand. Incredible to see technology and tennis in such close collaboration.
According to the IBM case study (link in comments), IBM captures over 2.7 million data points from Wimbledon each year.
🔹 ‘Catch Me Up’ uses match data augmented with generative AI from IBM's watsonx to provide updates on players' progress, via the Wimbledon app and website. Built using IBM’s Granite large language model (trained on the Wimbledon editorial style from nearly 130 million documents) its output is monitored by the AELTC.
However, reporting errors quickly emerged, including giving incorrect player rankings, misreporting career histories, and adopting US (not Wimbledon editorial) style. According to the Guardian, commentators and journalists have not been impressed by the quality (or use) of the AI tool (link in comments).
🔹 ‘Slamtracker’ is part of Wimbledon’s redesigned digital match centre. It uses generative AI from watsonx to enhance match footage to provide “bullet point-based match previews and post-match reviews” for singles matches and online coverage of more matches than previously available.
🔹 This year's Championships also offered a social media monitoring service to players from the Signify Group, called Threat Matrix. The tool monitors players' public-facing social media profiles (and direct messaging if the player wishes) to identify threatening and abusive comments in 35 languages and report them to the social media platform (link to Guardian article in comments.)
'Sports Tech' is usually associated with supporting match officials (with mixed results, including some highly-controversial AI-assisted referee decisions in football). The #AELTC has said it plans to roll-out AI line judges in future, to replace the team who currently monitor the boundaries of the court.
For better or for worse, this year’s Wimbledon Championships have shown that the relationship between AI, sport and sports journalism, may become far broader in future....