The Olympic Games have their roots in ancient times, and now they will be incorporating modern technology.
This year, highlights from the Summer Olympics will be provided by artificial intelligence, more specifically, an AI-generated narration from Al Michaels.
Executives at NBCUniversal and the streaming service Peacock said Wednesday they will be releasing a customized daily Olympics highlights show for streaming subscribers that will feature the voice of Michaels, the 79-year-old American announcer who first covered the games decades ago.
But Michaels won’t be holed up in the broadcast booth every night delivering quick recaps of the dozens of Olympic events that took place. Instead, the Peacock show will be trained on NBC clips of Michaels (he joined NBC in 2006 and was a longtime announcer for “Sunday Night Football”) to construct coherent, realistic sentences that “will showcase Michaels’ unique expertise and eloquence,” the company said.
Mr. Michaels approved the use of his voice.
“When I heard about this I was skeptical but of course I was interested,” Michaels said in a statement issued by the company. “Then I saw a detailed demonstration of what they had in mind and I said, ‘I’m in.'”
It raises an important question, reminiscent of Michaels’ most famous Olympic call: Do NBCUniversal executives believe in miracles?
NBC has had exclusive coverage of the Olympics in the United States since 1996, and the network has often faced intense public scrutiny over its coverage of the games.
Handing over the keys to an AI carries new risks. An AI-generated Al Michaels would undoubtedly attract attention because of its novelty. And as AI has proliferated over the past 18 months, there has been no shortage of stories of embarrassing mistakes, missteps, and slightly unsettling hallucinations.
Peacock subscribers who want to watch daily highlight videos will be able to choose the Olympic events they are most interested in and the type of highlights they want to watch, including viral clips, gold medalists, finals and more.
From there, Peacock’s AI machines get to work extracting the most noteworthy moments each night and assembling them into a neat, customized package, with Michaels’ recreated voice over the reel. (Humans perform quality-control checks on the AI highlight reels.)
NBCUniversal officials said they expect 7 million variations of customized highlights throughout the game, which will be displayed in the Peacock app for registered users.
Brian Roberts, chairman of Comcast, the parent company of NBCUniversal, showed off a new clip from Al Michaels at an event introducing AI-Al (officially called “Daily Olympics Recap on Peacock”).
Roberts said the idea was born out of a meeting a few months ago between executives from Comcast and NBCUniversal who discussed, “What can we do with AI? How can we use it purely for fun and for good?”
“We’ve tried to invent and innovate and come up with better things time and time again,” Roberts added after the demonstration.
The Olympics come at an important time for NBCUniversal. Peacock lost nearly $3 billion last year and lags far behind rivals like Netflix and Disney+ in total subscribers. But the streaming service has seen big subscriber gains over the past year and has relied on sports for that growth: In January, Peacock aired NFL playoff games exclusively for the first time.
The Olympics, which begin July 26, will present an entirely different test for the company. In addition to daytime and primetime coverage on NBC and an array of cable networks, Peacock will play a key role in the company’s Olympics coverage, streaming all of the Olympic events.
In an interview, Peacock president Kelly Campbell called the new AI tool “groundbreaking” and said that if it works, it could soon be implemented on the streaming platform in other ways, such as Andy Cohen AI recaps of Bravo shows.
“We want to do a version of this for every sporting event and show that we air on Peacock,” she said. “It’s something that really sets us apart. We’re in a sea of similarities, so it’s really nice to have something that actually sets us apart.”
