As fans reacted to the Matildas’ loss to the United States and their unexpectedly early exit from the Olympics, an unusual question emerged: how would AI Steph Catley explain this to the kids?
With the Matildas scheduled to kick-off at the inconvenient time of 3 am AEST when many of their young fans would be asleep, Football Australia and marketing agency Ogilvy had a creative solution: release a podcast featuring captain Steph Catley retelling Matildas matches as children’s stories, aimed at five- to 12-year-olds.
However, though Football Australia said Dream Team episodes would be “narrated with Catley’s own voice”, it soon explained that this was possible “via the magic of AI”.
Putting the issues with conflating technology and magic aside, the result is about what you would expect: it sounds like Steph Catley, but without ever feeling like you’re really listening to Steph Catley. Perhaps this is fine for the children it’s aimed at, provided they ignore the AI voice introducing itself as Steph Catby. Crikey contacted Football Australia and Ogilvy for comment but neither responded.
Amid concerns about the gendered harms of non-consensual deepfakes and cost-cutting measures like using AI voice clones instead of voice actors, the decision to use AI to simulate Catley’s voice seemed unusual. During last year’s SAG-AFTRA strike, many deemed the proposal from major studios to scan background actors for AI replication as a plot ripped from an episode of Black Mirror.
Catley appears to have consented to the creation of her AI voice clone, but is it okay for a national sporting body to ask a star player to do so? Crikey contacted Catley’s management for comment but they did not respond.
Kathryn Gill, co-chief executive of Professional Footballers Australia, told Crikey there is potential to use AI to connect the Matildas and Socceroos with fans if it can be done ethically and responsibly.
“However, the fundamental principle is that workers and athletes should have control over both their likeness and the way that AI will be used in their work,” says Gill. “When we consider the creation of content that uses AI to clone a player’s attributes, there needs to be incredibly strict safeguards around that, to ensure responsible use.”
There is no specific protection for an individual’s likeness in Australia, but a combination of existing regulation including copyright, consumer and contract law may apply.
Gill says that “without consideration for the ongoing ownership and usage of that data”, we are opening the door to issues around “privacy, intellectual property, and the potential for manipulation, and reputational risk”.
Depending on how much attention they paid to the Dream Team announcement, a listener may not have realised it used AI. The original posts announcing the podcast — on Facebook, Instagram and X — described the stories as “narrated by Steph Catley”, with readers having to click through to Football Australia’s website to discover it was using AI to mimic Catley’s voice.
The descriptions on Spotify and Apple Podcasts were more transparent, adding that it “used special Al technology, so it sounds just like Steph Catley is narrating the story”.
The X post for the first episode didn’t mention the use of AI, but the second episode’s post did, which received negative replies, including a fan asking why weren’t players, including former or injured players, used instead of AI. The post for the final episode, which also mentioned the use of AI, had its comments restricted.
The Dream Team podcast hasn’t been alone in finding a use for AI within the fan-athlete dynamic this Olympics. But as new technologies promise greater connection with less effort required, people are pushing back on the premise that AI is just as good as the real deal.
In the US, Google released an Olympic-themed advertisement for its generative-AI Gemini, featuring a father asking for help to write a fan letter from his young daughter to her idol, athlete Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. It was pulled following backlash that Google had missed the point of these kinds of letters — actual human connection.
