This week marks the return of the 87th edition of the historic golf tournament, The Masters. With this exciting news, IBM, the long-time tournament sponsor, brings a modern twist. Through the Masters app or Masters.com, IBM will provide automated audio commentary on over 20,000 video clips of shots during the Masters. To create this commentary, Watson Text to Speech, IBM's cloud-based API chatbot service was used. Artificial intelligence (AI) was trained to understand and speak the language of golf to provide meaningful, engaging clips.

In addition, IBM will provide new hole-by-hole player predictions at this year's Masters. To create these, AI models will analyze six years worth of historical Masters performances and a total of 120,000 golf shots. This will help fantasy golf teams make smart decisions during the tournament.

The increasing use of AI has sparked optimism and excitement, but also fear. Last week, over 1,100 researchers and other prominent technologists signed an online petition which called on OpenAI to pause development of its ChatGPT-4 generative AI system, due to the uncertain impact that advanced artificial intelligence might have on society without appropriate safeguards and regulations.

IBM is one of the largest technology companies to embrace the furthering of generative AI. At the same time, CEO Arvind Krishna sent a letter to Congress on racial justice reform in 2020, saying IBM will not condone the use of facial recognition technology for unethical activities such as mass surveillance, racial profiling, or basic human rights violations. Additionally, he expressed the shared responsibility of vendors and users of AI systems to check and test for bias, particularly when used in law enforcement, and to have results audited and reported.



Other News from Today