(San Francisco) Streaming platform Peacock will offer personalized audio and video recaps of the events during the Olympic Games this summer with the voice of sportscaster Al Michaels, generated by artificial intelligence (AI).
“When they told me about it I was skeptical but curious, obviously,” said the star presenter of the American channel NBC, quoted in a press release from NBCUniversal on Wednesday.
“Then I saw a demo […] and I said “banco”,” he added.
Interested subscribers will choose three sports and receive their personalized recap every morning with images from the channel and audio commentary automatically generated by AI, with the voice of Al Michaels.
In the promotional video, the voice generated by the AI is a perfect illusion: it is impossible to know, without the mention “generated with AI”, that the real human commentator did not record the soundtrack.
Popularized by ChatGPT since the end of 2022, generative AI makes it possible to produce all kinds of content (texts, images, sounds, etc.), from mountains of data, by simple query in everyday language.
The impressive results give rise to numerous applications (document summaries, writing messages, generating illustrations, etc.), but they also often contain “hallucinations” (factual errors or oddities).
“A team of NBCU editors will review all content, including audio and clips, for quality and accuracy before recaps are made available to users,” it said. chain.
NBCUniversal estimates that as many as seven million different personalized versions of the daily recap could air in the United States during the Paris Olympics.
The announcement comes as numerous artists, authors, engineers and newspapers have filed lawsuits against various generative AI companies, including OpenAI (ChatGPT), accusing them of using their works or work to train their AI models. AI.
The issue was also at the heart of the historic mobilization of Hollywood screenwriters and actors last summer, worried that new technology would serve to replace them at low cost.
In April, more than 200 renowned musicians, including stars Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj and Katy Perry, called in an open letter for better protection of creation and authors’ rights “against the predatory use of AI to steal the voices” of professionals.