Cris Collinsworth was a guest on Up & Adams on Tuesday. In addition to discussing his future assignment calling flag football's debut at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, Collinsworth told host Kay Adams the news that an A.I. version of Al Michaels would be used by NBC during the 2024 Games.
Collinsworth happily explained to Adams why his old booth mate was a "genius," and showed no interest in whether anyone wanted or needed something like a computer generated version of Al Michaels' voice calling highlights.
Never thought we'd see the day where Cris Collinsworth explains A.I. to us 😅
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Al Michael’s Olympic A.I. explained @CollinsworthPFF 🔊
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"He's gonna make so much money to have his voice on the Olympics when doing zero work," said Collinsworth. "He will be doing as little as I'm doing and not getting paid, and he'll be getting paid. The man is an utter genius. But he does have one of his billionaire friends that we get to go on his yacht because we're going to go to Italy afterwards and go hang out down there 'cause I gotta work on my tan a little bit. So he's got a billionaire guy down there we get to go hang on the yacht for a little bit."
So there you go. Collinsworth approves of A.I. Michaels because it will make his friend a bunch of money while he hangs out on a billionaire's yacht. He is downright giddy about the naked cash grab.
Are any actual people outside the C-suites asking for this? Does it matter? Apparently not!
After hearing Collinsworth praise Michaels' business acumen, Adams asked a question which she probably intended as a joke, but got a shockingly earnest answer from Collinsworth about when he would be dipping his toes in the A.I. waters. Turns out they're already working on A.I. Cris Collinsworth at Pro Football Focus and he's happy to have them working up a A.I. Kay Adams next.
"It's unbelievable," said Collinsworth. " So all you have to do is have somebody write out... we'll do this for you. PFF will do this for you. We do all these game scripts and storylines and all these things about the thing. And do it in your voice, right? And you just stay home. So they just put a picture up there and you stay home and you got a whole show and it sounds just like you. If you haven't heard it yet, you've got to do it. They did a thing of me doing PFF highlights in my voice and you sit there and you go... you can't even believe it. I mean... it's not like taped. It's not any part your voice. It's like they put old audio tapes of your voice in a machine and then it comes out and it's you."
Cool?
What exactly is it that Collinsworth thinks makes people like him and Al Michaels special? Is it not how they watch and prepare and think and feel and express themselves while they call games or discuss football? Or is it literally just the sound of their voices? Because isn't that all the A.I. Michaels and Collinsworth's will be? The sound of the guys sports fans have grown up with? Why should fans care at all about the people who call the games if the people who call the games aren't even calling the games? Why would we care about them as people and personalities if they are only involved to the extent that they're collecting a paycheck?
Yeah, it's just dumb highlights now, but what about when Amazon buys the rights to their voices and reunites them on Thursday Night Football completely powered by Alexa? Forget some younger announcer paying his or her dues to call games on the biggest stage, we've got what sounds like Al and Cris and they're not programmed to renegotiate contracts or get lured to the NFL's newest broadcast partner.
This is just white noise applied to actual sports. And why bother playing sports anyway if artificial intelligence will eventually be able to generate decent facsimiles of athletes and games? Forget the human element— just get rid of humans altogether.
On top of all that, there's the fact that Collinsworth is apparently going to use this for Pro Football Focus, the analytics company where he bought a majority interest in 2014. A recent article in Front Office Sports laid out the troubles at PFF, which included layoffs and employee turnover since private equity got involved, to go along with the site's troubles battling increased competition thanks to "automated player tracking and machine learning." Yes, those italics were added for effect.
Spending time and resources on fake Cris Collinsworth to do anything at a company that literally employs Cris Collinsworth seems kind of dumb. The same can be said for NBC and Michaels. If these are things that Collinsworth and Michaels don't deem worthy of their actual time... why should people care about what the A.I has to say?
It makes you wonder who is asking for any of this. Are there real consumers who wonder what highlights would sound like with the soulless voice of Michaels's narrating them? It seems like it would be equally difficult to find anyone who would visit Pro Football Focus just to hear what not-actually Collinsworth has to say. The type of people who are interested in this seem like they would be incredibly hard to find. Possibly because they're all on a yacht in the Mediterranean.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Cris Collinsworth Apparently Exploring an A.I. Version of Himself for 'Pro Football Focus'.
