Technology and sports fairness

[CoyoteChris]

This weekend, using the new AI umpire, 176 pitching calls were challanged. Half were overturned. One umpire got caught 6 of 8 times making bad calls. I am not blaming the century of professional umpires who made bad calls...we have all seen the shouting matches at the plate....but it is clear that without available technology, there is only so much that a human being can do to make a call. In our sport, us fans at our leasure can go back and play URs on big screen tvs and stop and start the jump landings. Its time to dump the tech specialist's opinion on close calls and turn to readily available technology to review jump landings.

 

[brblja]

I don’t think the solution is AI tbh. First ISU needs to stop tying the tech panel’s hands by not allowing them to review some elements in stop motion or on freeze frame. Then maybe start using already existing non-AI technology to support subjective calls like speed/ice coverage (many comps were already showing graphics of it to audiences, nothing but the rulebook stopping judges from using it to make some of the PCS/GOE calls fairer).

Similarly, current judging app has buttons to vote -5 to +5 on GOE for each element, it’s not hard to have judges instead mark which positive/negative factors they see and autoscore GOE based on that (no one would have to guess why a certain element was judged to have different execution level).

And only then, once you have dependable data, think about AI tools. If you teach them based on current state, it’s just gonna be garbage in garbage out.