Gavin Cooney

TO SWEDEN, WHERE this column has again seen the future and recoiled in queasy horror. 

TV coverage of the Swedish football league has lately debuted Aida, whom they say is the first AI-generated football pundit in history. 

Data science company Twelve Football developed the AI pundit in three weeks, at the request of the broadcaster.

Aida is effectively a ventriloquising of their “opposition analysis tool”,  which scrapes data and information on how a certain team has set up in previous games before then spitting out recommended tactics on how to combat said team. 

The data company then took all this opposition analysis, put it into a large language model, and asked it to present it in a way that would be engaging to TV viewers.

The synthesising of a complex load of information into something pithy and intelligible to a large audience used to be a signifier of a great broadcaster, but they seem to have now lost the patent on that skill. 

The TV channel then Victor Frankensteined their new AI pundit, designing an avatar through which the data would speak. They alighted on Aida, stressing that appearance “wasn’t key”, but were clear that they wanted the AI pundit to be female. (We’re not sure the insistence that their fake pundit would be a woman is the flourish of progressivism they think it is.)

“Although she looks human, it should be clear that she isn’t,” producer Marcus Sennewald told the Training Ground Guru website.

And so Aida has been switched on for two-minute analysis slots live on air, but this isn’t merely an animation of pre-written information: at one point in Aida’s debut appearance, she was interrupted by the (human) presenter, and then responded. 

The channel are at pains to point out the AI pundit is merely an addition to the coverage and is not intended to replace human beings and they are sticking by their animation despite criticism in Sweden. 

The bland and uncanny CGI face of Aida is nonetheless able to inflame all manner of emotion. 

There is a part of this column which is intrigued by the deeper possibilities of an AI fleet of football pundits, of course. Can broadcasters render AI versions of all of their pundits, to the point that the viewer can choose their own punditry line-up for any specific game?

And why do they need to stick with their contemporary pundits? Why not revive the pundits of yesteryear and make them available on air, in a manner similar to unlocking Diego Maradona or Pele on Fifa Ultimate Team?

We could bring turn back to the Peak RTÉ Panel Era, and scrape their past judgements on Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard, and John Terry for the benefit of the ultimate punditry on Jude Bellingham, whose brilliant talent, affronted attitude, tactical weirdness, and sheer Englishness would have made him their greatest muse.

Imagine Mid-2000s Dunphy putting together a package titled “Bad Bellingham Play.” It would be the football punditry equivalent of the De Niro/Pacino meeting in Heat. 

But these exciting possibilities are quickly mantled by our sheer horror at what Sweden’s AI pundit augurs.

This column’s chief concern is obviously one of self-preservation. If a football pundit on live television can be replaced by AI, what of wry, work-from-home sports columnists? 

This is first and foremost a shattering blow to the ego of us columnists, this notion that our weekly, deadline-drive thoughts are the product of anything other than the mysterious but genius workings of our singular minds.  

No columnist can believe themselves to be dispensable. It’s such an ego-driven existence that any thoughts of doubt or, indeed, modesty, must be repressed well beyond view. 

There is a deeper terror to AI: the fact its making us feel complicit in our own obsolescence. With every word we type and every click we make, we are feeding some shadowy force enough information to first imitate us and then replace us. 

The Greek mythological figure of Autolycus – in punditryspeak, a Bad Lad – had the power to transfigure into the thing he stole, and is a parable of AI. Except in this instance, there wasn’t any theft involved. We just signed it all over in return for the dopamine hit of a retweet.

Writing in the Financial Times recently, data journalist extraordinaire John Burn-Murodch looked at employment data in the United States to figure out which jobs are most under threat from AI.

He found that those working desk jobs best protected from being replaced by machines were those whose work was the “messiest”, ie those in which there was involved the unpredictability of several back and forths with other people. Those most at risk, he found, were those performing a “predictable recurring linear task.” 

This uncovers an inconvenient truth about the corner of the world with which we are dealing here. A large chunk of football coverage at the moment could easily be performed by robots, with so much of punditry and analysis now just the trotting out of stats and facts, regardless of their relevance or importance. 

To pick one recent example: the BBC told us at half-time of Liverpool’s win against Spurs that it was the first time that Tottenham have trailed by two or more goals in a Premier League away game after scoring the first goal since a 4-1 loss to Leicester City in February 2023. Er, historic. 

If the robots are capable of telling us these stats and facts and also of explaining systems and tactics, punditry can try to futureproof itself by leaning into the messier parts of the game, its human and emotional dimension.

Give us fewer stats and less tactical jargon; cut out the analysis of referee decisions and the dry word of the football laws. Give us what’s knotty and subjective and unpredictable.

And they should hold no fear in doing so, because columnists like this one won’t be around for much longer to sneer at their work.