AI Will Help Generate Commentary for Masters Golf Tourney

The Masters begins this week, and the 87th version of the historic golf match will arrive with a contemporary twist: commentary of video highlights generated by synthetic intelligence (AI), courtesy of IBM.

The longtime Masters sponsor will present automated audio commentary on greater than 20,000 video clips of pictures through the Masters, which runs this Thursday by means of Sunday at Augusta Nationwide Golf Membership in Georgia. 

Followers can entry the spoken AI commentary by means of the official Masters app or Masters.com. Based on a press launch, IBM skilled the AI to course of the language of golf “with various sentence construction and vocabulary, avoiding redundant play-by-play iterations to make the clips informative and fascinating.”

Watson Textual content to Speech, a cloud-based API chatbot service from IBM, was used to construct the brand new audio commentary characteristic. IBM’s Watson AI may also energy new hole-by-hole participant predictions at this yr’s Masters to undertaking a participant’s rating on every gap all through the match.

IBM’s AI fashions will analyze six years price of historic Masters performances—greater than 120,000 golf pictures in whole—to forged the predictions, which may help followers make choices for his or her fantasy golf groups. It’s an elevated model of final yr’s round-by-round rating prediction characteristic. IBM has been an official accomplice of The Masters since 1996.

The rise of AI chatbots and generative AI has dominated tech headlines in current months, with industries far and extensive experimenting with the fast-evolving expertise. Nonetheless, with optimism and pleasure additionally comes worry over the broader societal influence of AI.

Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and Andrew Yang have been amongst over 1,100 outstanding technologists and researchers to signal an internet petition final week that known as on OpenAI to pause improvement of its ChatGPT-4 generative AI system, attributable to considerations concerning the influence that superior synthetic intelligence can have on humanity with out safeguards and laws.

IBM is among the many newest expertise giants to embrace furthering generative AI, which differs from the corporate’s strategy on one other controversial type of AI-driven expertise.

In 2020, IBM stopped providing and creating its facial recognition companies, and despatched a letter about racial justice reform to Congress that learn, “IBM firmly opposes and won’t condone makes use of of any expertise, together with facial recognition expertise supplied by different distributors, for mass surveillance, racial profiling, violations of primary human rights and freedoms.”

“Synthetic intelligence is a strong device that may assist regulation enforcement maintain residents protected,” the 2020 letter from IBM CEO Arvind Krishna reads. “However distributors and customers of AI techniques have a shared accountability to make sure that AI is examined for bias, significantly when utilized in regulation enforcement, and that such bias testing is audited and reported.”