AI is Changing How You Watch the Olympics Without You Knowing It

Intel, a sponsor of the Paris Olympics, has developed an AI that automatically selects the highlights based on crowd noise.

The Olympics are an opportunity to enjoy sports we love or discover lesser known disciplines. This experience could enhanced at the Paris Olympics thanks to artificial intelligence.

Video platforms like TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels already use AI extensively to suggest videos from accounts you don't follow but might find interesting. The AI on these platforms might suggest you watch videos of competitions you don't usually follow. Developing on this, the Paris Olympics benefit from Intel's technology that automatically generates highlights.

The Olympic broadcasting service uses an AI called Automatic Highlights Generation, trained on Intel's Geti platform, the AI partner of the Olympics. As Intel explains, this technology "can aggregate personalized summaries from multiple disciplines and instantly distribute them to fans, creating efficiencies in production and editing."

In other words, thanks to this automation, viewers will be able to see more highlights during the Olympics. It might even result in more relevant clips. According to an article in Fortune, this AI primarily relies on crowd noise to highlight the most exciting moments of the competition.

It is currently unknown if lesser known sports will benefit from this technology in terms of audience or popularity. However, this is one of Intel's and the International Olympic Committee's goals. "One of the goals we had with the IOC was to access some of the less popular sports, which perhaps haven't had as much airtime as those we would consider key events," said Dermot Hargaden, president of Intel for the EMEA region, according to Fortune.

Depending on how well Intel's automatic highlight AI works at the Paris 2024 games, we could see this type of AI technology in future sporting events. We are already seeing AI generated coverage of events, for example in ice hockey, where several cameras positioned around the stadium are trained to follow the action in the game, reducing the need for manually operated camera. Watch this space !