Post by Jonathan J.

Could an algorithm judge the Olympics? I was walking the dog this morning, thinking about the Big Air snowboarding finals on Saturday. Watching as a novice, I was struck by how subjective the scoring is. What is seemingly more difficult? More stylistic? A hand touches the snow — is that for balance, stabilization, or by accident? How do you score that without bias? I am wondering, could AI have been a judge? Can AI get to the point of evaluating whether or not a snowboarding jump is a 95 or 74 based on metrics, taken from camera angles, drones, and programming. Could we build a model that turns those metrics into an objective score? Can the "qualitative" actually be programmed into a baseline? I kept thinking about the snowboarder from New Zealand, Dane Menzies. His second run looked just as good as his first, but the judges dropped his score by a few points. I didn’t understand why. That drop forced him to approach his last run aggressively and risk more on his final run. He fell, and that was that. If the judges had given him those extra few points on the second run, would he have approached that final jump differently? Would he have medaled? I don't know. I'm not a snowboarding expert. And I'm still figuring out what I trust AI with and what I don't, where it hallucinates and where it fails. But as we move into this automated system of work, more so every day, are we going to start seeing AI creep into our sports? In events that have been historically subjective—and at times political, like figure skating, can AI take the politics and the relationships out of it. Or is the human element the whole point. Would you trust a gold medal decided by a model — is that the direction we’re heading toward? #artificialintelligence #olympics #LLM