Human judges clearly suck in combat sports, so now it’s time to let the robots take a shot at it.
Artificial intelligence is about to hit the combat sports world in a big way this Saturday December 21st for the Oleksandr Usyk vs. Tyson Fury 2 fight.
According to Riyadh Season promoter Turki Alalshikh, they’ll have an AI judge watching the fight and scoring it unofficially.
“For the first time ever, an AI-powered judge will monitor the fight,” Alalshikh wrote on X (formerly Twitter). “Free from bias and human error, brought to you by The Ring [magazine]. This groundbreaking experiment, which won’t impact the official results, debuts during the biggest fight of the century, Usyk vs. Fury 2 … Don’t miss history in the making.”
A video accompanying Alalshikh’s post gives more info on ‘4th Judge,’ which looks like it will also be providing statistics along with round-by-round judging.
For the first time ever, an AI-powered judge will monitor the fight Free from bias and human error brought to you by The Ring. This groundbreaking experiment, which won’t impact the official results, debuts during the biggest fight of the century, #Usyk2Fury, on December 21 … pic.twitter.com/RdslVlBLRC
— TURKI ALALSHIKH (@Turki_alalshikh) December 17, 2024
“For years, boxing has been defined by its glory,” the video declared. “But sometimes its glory is clouded by doubt and controversy. Isn’t it time for fairness to step into the ring? The Ring, the bible of boxing, introduces ‘4th Judge,’ the first ever AI boxing judge. A groundbreaking AI designed to bring fairness to the ring displaying metrics like aggression, landed punches, impact, defensive deployments, and winning probability in real time.”
“This isn’t just AI, it’s revolutionizing boxing. It’s fairness powered by technology and human expertise.”
We’re pretty curious as to how this will go. Boxing judging is notoriously terrible, and it’s hard to imagine an A.I. doing worse. That being said, anyone who’s ever tried to use current AI tools to research combat sports knows it does a pretty dogshit job. But that’s just consumer-grade chat-based tools which aren’t specifically trained for one job. Who knows how well a visual model extensively trained on thousands of boxing matches will do?
Alalshikh is confident enough in 4th Judge’s abilities to unleash it on the world for Usyk vs. Fury 2. So was Google when they integrated AI answers to their search that told people to eat rocks and use glue as pizza topping.
How do you see this going, Maniacs? Let us know in the comments below!