Former Olympic Skier Is Looking Towards AI to Combat Poor Judging In Sports
Former Olympic skier and NFL player, Jeremy Bloom, saw first hand the human errors that are inherent to judging sports. His solution: Owl AI. Bloom developed this start-up company to take a software approach to this long-standing problem.
Bloom in no way intends to remove the human aspect from judging sports, but rather he is aiming to remove inevitable bias. By starting with feeding the software good examples of proper calls and then continuing to work with it, there is a future where it functions like a truly objective human judge. Giving it more and more examples to use as feedback and when making a judgement so that it can truly be objective is the eventual goal.
The philosophy of Owl AI is to keep all the best parts of humans in judging sports but remove any opportunity for bias. Owl AI is not meant to replace judges, but rather be a helpful tool.
This software was used to rejudge the final of the Women’s Snowboarding Slopestyle competition at the Milan Cortina Olympic Games, labeled by some as one of the worst judged events. It found that the silver winner should have in fact won gold, which agreed with the opinion of many audience members.
Bloom knows how hard all of these athletes work to get where they are, especially with the pressure placed on Olympic athletes to perform their best, and they only get the opportunity every four years.Â
Having the stakes be so high at these competitions, it’s imperative that the judging be on point. Owl AI could certainly be a step in the right direction to solving this problem, along with helping judges face pushback from audiences. Especially as sports-betting becomes an increasingly popular element of professional sports.
It seems as though, in the ski community in particular, this may be a welcome addition to any judging panel. I am personally curious to see how this pans out. I think as long as it remains a tool rather than a replacement Owl AI could be the ticket for the future of successful ski judging, though I am not sure I can speak for its success in other sporting arenas.
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