It’s a real threat, and not just in the arts. Why not replace college and professional sports with AI generated games and players? We could take injuries and bad calls out of the game, and every game could be a cliffhanger. The great players of the past could be given pixelized immortality on the holodeck. All races and genders could be fully and proportionally represented, and soon every viewer will be able to give a prompt and have a bespoke game and season conjured up in seconds.
What’s not to like?
All sports would become self referential daydreams, and I can be the hero every time.
Oh, goody.
When the concept is proven in sports, we can then apply it to politics....
Team Mamdani and Team Trump can exist blissfully sude by side because all the work will be done by machines and opposing factions will not even be aware of each other because everyone will be in a completely self referential virtual reality. Life will be an eternal conversation with oneself. Bliss.
Or maybe not.
Science fiction got there a long time ago.
But for anyone who steps out of the pods, there are awkward and challenging encounters with others. There is disagreement, conflixt, loss, pain, surprise, delight and joy in a world that is not predictable becauae it is not scripted. It is the encounter with The Other that drives everything.
> Why not replace college and professional sports with AI generated games and players? <
Now that’s an interesting concept. Every week AI videos get more realistic, it seems. There are sports videos on Facebook that I know are AI only because the participants do superhuman stuff, like jump too far.
Very soon a football fan will be watching an AI football game, and not realize it’s AI. The big question: will he care if the game is fun to watch?
Hadn’t thought about games. The results may depend on the betting amounts.
I was thinking about sports reporting. If you plug in the play by play, AIO could give you a good summary of the action and determine the key plays in the results. Player Interviews responses are heavily coached now so why not just have AI generate the responses.
You can already get a scholarship for being on the videogaming team. As videogames, AI and virtual reality get better they may take over actual sports. I wonder, though. Athletes can license their images and records to game makers, but if they aren’t also playing against each other in real-life how will we know how good they are? And if it’s entirely made-up characters who compete in the virtual games, isn’t something lost? Michael Jordan or Tom Brady has something that an entirely fictional character doesn’t.
In the early 70s when I still watched baseball the network (NBC I think) had computer match-ups of the great teams in history. So it was the 27 Yankees, the 61 Yankees and other teams playing each other in a bracket set-up. I don’t know how “real” any of that was. Computer science was relatively new. But forever playing off the 31 A’s and 34 Cardinals and 55 Dodgers would probably get boring pretty soon, especially if the game weren’t being played in real life.