In the late eighties and early nineties, had you asked anyone on the street what they thought about artificial intelligence, you might have gotten a wide spectrum of answers. The dawning era of computers and the internet brought upon a fear of machines, spawning classic films such as the Terminator Series, the Robocop Saga, and a litany of other nefarious androids that used the magical and inexplicable power of ‘AI.’ What you might not find, though, is a single person who might believe that our Electronic Overlords would have an interest in our Olympic Games, much less so that a supercomputer would have an opinion on the outcomes of said games.
Well, that is exactly the case here in the modern age, where houses cannot function without screaming at them. Instead of asking people what they think about artificial intelligence, asking AI what it thinks about people can show a different perspective. This contrasts with the dread-instilling ominous statements about Skynet, or strapping people into “The Matrix.”. Results show signs of encouragement. specifically, it was very kind in its portrayal of Olympic athletes.
What does AI think about the Olympic Games?
When asked, several Generative Pretrained Transformers (GPTs), such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s CoPilot (which is a modified version of ChatGPT), what the Olympics represented to them, answered with somewhat sweet and thoughtful responses: “A symbolic brotherhood of mankind across cultures, celebrating civil sportsmanship around the world,” and “the competitive nature of games symbolizes the struggle of each of the world’s people to find meaning in a standardized setting,” respectfully. While this certainly was more robotic in tone, being that their response was more of an observation of the Olympic Games’ structure, and less about the meaning of the Games on a sentimental level, it was still awe-inspiring to witness a thought.
It was evident in this line of questioning that artificial intelligence was capable of a lot more than simply answering the most mundane of quandaries. Clearly, AI was at a point in which it could extrapolate a unique point from presented data in a way that was analogous to human thought patterns, and it could even make a statement on sports events. One could picture it in the not-so-distant future: a robot buddy for antisocial people with partners who are ever so tired of the ESPN after-show discussions. This spurred even more curiosity; it could lead one to posit that maybe, if artificial intelligence can reason something as abstract as a semblance of meaning out of raw data, it could then make a fair guess about the outcomes of certain games. A further litmus test was required to find out more.
Predictions compared to a person’s
The work judged these GPT’s predictions against the writers at Total Apex, and this led to gobsmacking results. When asked about basketball teams going into the Olympics, ChatGPT stated, “While historically Team USA is the dominating force in basketball, with five consecutive Gold Medal earnings, Canada and Spain pose a significant challenge for total US dominion over the sport,” which is exactly the consensus of the sports-journaling community. This didn’t quite align with our Corry Pappas’ postulation about Greece’s status as a “Sleeper Team,” but hope was not lost for the conquering hero, Mr. Pappas.
When then shifting the attention to CoPilot, readers could have been pleasantly and astoundingly surprised to read, “While there is stout competition from Spain, Slovenia, and Canada, statistically, the Greek team stands a higher-than-average chance of being the greatest upset on the bracket this cycle,” which directly supports and correlates with our teammate’s opinion. It remains to be seen how accurate these other statements are, as the bid for gold in men’s basketball continues. It seems that when presented with facts and data, thought processes, artificial or natural, will achieve a similar result, but what if a computer is given to individuals, rather than a team, nameless and without ties to a country? What if AI is given only stats and data of the sum parts, not the whole?
This question was fueled by an itch for the scientific method; after all, it would be interesting to see a clear bias in an artificial intelligence that learns from people. A conundrum had been created, an existential dread took root, and it could lead one to think, “If silly questions about the Olympic Games prove that a computer can have an opinion about a subject based entirely on biases and hearsay of its peers, then we are DOOMED,” but we pressed on, anyway. This further fed an artificial intelligence panel, consisting of three GPTs, the weights, wingspans, and key career statistics about the main contenders in an event that was already completed, the Women’s Freestyle Relay Swimming, and the times were recorded. The good news, the top four were spot on, with our AI stating that the Canadian team would be the Apex Contenders, with the United States taking silver, Australia taking bronze, and China barely unqualifying. Of course, this was not the case, but the predictions were close enough to accurately pick the top teams reliably, and unbiasedly.
Potential ramifications
When immediately examined, this test asking the artificial intelligence about the teams and countries in a hypothetical separate from recent events, they picked the US as the gold winners and the Canadians taking silver, clearly showing a bias toward the United States and Canada, spitting the facts to pick their favorite, which is a truly stunning result. This could lead some to believe, that in the future, computers may have independent opinions and thoughts, at least in the wide, wide world of sports.
Well, for sports, it could very well mean that in a few years, a computer will accurately pick winners to a degree that removes doubt. This could, in turn, absolutely change the very nature of betting in general. But it’s safe to not worry, as it could very well be analogous to asking a buddy who simply really likes the Yankees, and swears that one day, they’ll be back on top. Especially if this little thought experiment and revelation is anything to consider. What it certainly showed, is that sometimes, intuition is just as strong as your reason.
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