Robot history! First AI boxing judge set to debut during Oleksandr Usyk vs. Tyson Fury 2

Human judges clearly suck in combat sports, so now it’s time to let the robots take a shot at it.

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Can’t get much worse.

Artificial intelligence is about to hit the combat sports world in a big way this Saturday (Dec. 21, 2024) for the Oleksandr Usyk vs. Tyson Fury 2 showdown, which will take place inside Kingdom Arena in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

According to Riyadh Season promoter, Turki Alalshikh, an AI judge will watch the Heavyweight rematch and score it ... unofficially.

“For the first time ever, an AI-powered judge will monitor the fight,” Alalshikh wrote on X (formerly Twitter). “Free from bias and human error, brought to you by The Ring [magazine]. This groundbreaking experiment, which won’t impact the official results, debuts during the biggest fight of the century, Usyk vs. Fury 2 ... Don’t miss history in the making.”

A video accompanying Alalshikh’s post gives more info on the “fourth judge,” which looks like it will also be providing statistics along with round-by-round judging.

“For years, boxing has been defined by its glory,” the video declared. “But, sometimes its glory is clouded by doubt and controversy. Isn’t it time for fairness to step into the ring? The Ring, the bible of boxing, introduces ‘4th Judge,’ the first ever AI boxing judge. A groundbreaking AI designed to bring fairness to the ring displaying metrics like aggression, landed punches, impact, defensive deployments, and winning probability in real time.

“This isn’t just AI, it’s revolutionizing boxing,” it added. “It’s fairness powered by technology and human expertise.”

We’re pretty curious as to how this will go. Boxing judging is notoriously terrible, and it’s hard to imagine an A.I. doing worse. That being said, anyone who’s ever tried to use current AI tools to research combat sports knows it does a pretty crappy job. But, that’s just consumer-grade, chat-based tools that aren’t specifically trained for one job.

Who knows how well a visual model extensively trained on thousands of boxing matches will do?

Alalshikh is confident enough in Fourth Judge’s abilities to unleash it on the world for Usyk vs. Fury 2. And so was Google when it integrated AI answers to their searches that told people to eat rocks and use glue as pizza topping.

How do you see this going, Maniacs? Let us know in the comments below!

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