The French Super Cup between PSG and Marseille was broadcast to other countries with real-time translation done with the help of artificial intelligence
Paris, January 1896. The Lumière brothers screened The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station, a 50-second short film. Many ran away screaming, convinced that the train would run them over. Cinema was born. Skeptics: “It’s bullshit, it doesn’t work. It has no future.” Go and ask Checco Zalone if it doesn’t work. Caution is needed when judging innovations that can open up new eras. Exactly 130 years after the Lumière train, the first commentary of a football match performed by Artificial Intelligence was broadcast. By a machine, not by a man. The French and Paris are still involved. The French Super Cup, PSG-Marseille, played in Kuwait and produced by Ligue 1, was commented by two French commentators, but in the other countries the match was broadcast with real-time translation done by AI.
How did it go? Soulless voice, from a video game, acceleration of pace in the goal area, but from a TV commercial for a drug (“Read the warnings carefully…”), not with the passionate participation of a competent narrator. And then the AI doesn’t know the “turning problem”. How do you translate “Beppe, let’s go to Berlin!”? A “futureless nonsense”? “Calm down”, Max would say. Just as cinema took on voice, color and future, so Artificial Intelligence has unexplored margins for development. But it will take time. Our good commentators will arrive peacefully at retirement. And, above all, it will always serve man. As demonstrated by the VAR. It seemed like the advent of Objective and Definitive Justice. Now we are here trembling at the thought of what he can do in Inter-Napoli.