(San Francisco) Streaming platform Peacock will offer personalized audio and video recaps of the events during the Olympic Games this summer with the artificial intelligence (AI)-generated voice of sportscaster Al Michaels.
“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: impossible to know, without the mention “generated with AI”, that the real human commentator did not record the soundtrack.
The impressive results give rise to numerous applications (document summaries, message writing, generation of 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 nearly seven million different personalized versions of the daily recap could be broadcast in the United States during the Paris Olympics.
The subject was also at the heart of the historic mobilization of Hollywood screenwriters and actors last summer, worried that new technology would be used 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 creative and authors’ rights “against the predatory use of AI to steal the voices” of professionals.
