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AI Idle

Soccer Telecast Ruined When AI-Controlled Camera Mistakes Ref's Bald Head For Ball (futurism.com) 59

Posted by EditorDavid from the round-and-shiny dept.
Futurism reports: Fans of the soccer team Caledonian Thistle FC from Inverness, Scotland, experienced something hilarious this week when the robot camera operator — automatically trained to keep the lens trained on the soccer ball using AI — kept mistaking the linesman's bald head for the ball, as IFL Science reports.

The result: angry (or amused) soccer fans kept losing track of the game because the camera kept swiveling to zoom in on the referee's hairless head, as seen in a video uploaded to YouTube (bonus points for the excellent soundtrack).
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Soccer Telecast Ruined When AI-Controlled Camera Mistakes Ref's Bald Head For Ball More

Soccer Telecast Ruined When AI-Controlled Camera Mistakes Ref's Bald Head For Ball

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  • I feel so much safer now (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nagora ( 177841 ) on Monday November 02, 2020 @07:44AM (#60674788)

    Knowing that AI will be driving cars around the streets, having seen this.

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by sinij ( 911942 )
      You should be fine as long as nobody paints over white lines on the road...

      • Can't wait for the 20 year sentences for attempted murder by the vandals.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          All it needs is a spill, something falls off the back of a flatbed or even a pedestrian dropping some liquid.

          That's one reason why lidar is so valuable for self driving cars. Then you are not just relying on vision, you have a 3D model to confirm against. MobileEye runs vision and lidar in parallel and then compares, kind of like having dual computer systems in some aircraft, and Waymo combines both into one model.

      • Re:I feel so much safer now (Score:5, Funny)

        by quenda ( 644621 ) on Monday November 02, 2020 @09:03AM (#60675014)

        You should be fine as long as nobody paints over white lines on the road...

        and re-paints into the cliff face with a painted tunnel. meep meep

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Megane ( 129182 )
        Cue the image of a (allegedly self-driving) car on a lay-by, surrounded by a circle of salt on the road, and then another dashed circle of salt. Now it is trapped like a spirit in a magic circle and can not escape because of the no-passing lines.

    • Knowing that AI will be driving cars around the streets, having seen this.

      I also feel much safer knowing they'll be able to avoid 100% of bald headed pedestrians.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dwywit ( 1109409 )

        Erm, they won't hitting other pedestrians if they're fixated on the bald ones.

        Imagine what'll happen if a woman in a low-cut blouse walks past.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Nidi62 ( 1525137 )

      Knowing that AI will be driving cars around the streets, having seen this.

      I can already see people trolling self-driving cars by standing on the side of the road wearing tshirts with stoplights on them.

    • They're not really the same thing. "AI" in this case is most likely a pretty simple optical tracking algorithm looking for a circle.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Nidi62 ( 1525137 )

        They're not really the same thing. "AI" in this case is most likely a pretty simple optical tracking algorithm looking for a circle.

        It probably wouldn't have happened if he were black. It was most likely looking for a white circle.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by CODiNE ( 27417 )

          Again with the racist algorithms. I demand equal AI tracking of bald black heads during soccer matches.

    • Knowing that AI will be driving cars around the streets, having seen this.

      Properly trained the AI can do an excellent job of avoiding false positives. I bet the same people who designed the soccer AI are programming the ones driving cars (or similar processes used). Run for the hills?

      • Yet we don't really have any evidence that they are any better... Making sure a stop sign is a stop sign seems like a no brainer to me.

        • Yet we don't really have any evidence that they are any better... Making sure a stop sign is a stop sign seems like a no brainer to me.

          Easy to us isn't exactly easy to a computer, but a lot of work is going into proper recognition in the real world, not just the lab. 99% on a real world data set seems pretty good: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]

          I suspect the soccer AI had a lot less going into figuring out not just what to train the AI with, but the proper training methods to work in the real world, not on training images.

          • The problem is that the cars ARE in the real world. They have trouble dealing with the real world yet they ARE in the real world. See the issue?

            • The problem is that the cars ARE in the real world. They have trouble dealing with the real world yet they ARE in the real world. See the issue?

              Which is why they tested it with data from the real world. From the article "Real-time video is taken by a digital camera from a moving vehicle and real world road signs are then extracted using vision-only information."

              Not saying it results in a 100% realistic scenario, but at least isn't completely artifical.

    • Just imagine what will happen when AI-controlled robots play soccer! Jesus, wouldn't want to be a bald ref then!

    • Knowing that AI will be driving cars around the streets, having seen this.

      Oh I know right. I saw a startup make an app and decided to base my opinions on industrial safety systems on that because they are both "code" and all "code" is the same.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by trawg ( 308495 )

      This makes think there's an entire TV series in just throwing things in front of cars that are self-driving to see which ones they stop for.

  • His head had been kicked a bit and was scuffed.

  • is encoded into the contestants of the next RoboCup Soccer Tournament! [robocup.org]

    Please don't kick the referee!

  • Whether it occurred, there have been stories about Marvin Minksky's bald head being mistaken for a ping pong ball by a ping-pong playing robot. If I remember correctly, I first heard that story in the 80's, so the problem has been known about at least as a risk for decades.

  • Hey (Score:5, Funny)

    by burtosis ( 1124179 ) on Monday November 02, 2020 @08:06AM (#60674832)
    Not every AI is cut out for sporting events, it looks like this one could have a promising career in stand up comedy.

  • Ugh (Score:4, Insightful)

    by kackle ( 910159 ) on Monday November 02, 2020 @08:27AM (#60674882)
    Ooo, "AI" huh? Sounds fancy. It must be better than the coding algorithms we have written every day, for decades.

    If it ever happens, I wonder what they're going to call the intelligent robot that's indistinguishable from a human, since this era has ruined "AI".
    • Exactly this. Thanks for wording my thoughts so accurately.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kackle ( 910159 )
        Well, my apologies then; as someone who does not have a computer science degree, "AI" seemed to be generally and broadly "intelligent, non-carbon brain". Isn't that the end-goal of MIT, et. al.? Scanning pictures for bald heads seems relatively trivial.

  • Just throw another thousand monkeys with typewriters at it. I wish I was joking.

  • Soccer (Score:3, Funny)

    by c ( 8461 ) <beauregardcp@gmail.com> on Monday November 02, 2020 @08:38AM (#60674922)

    I've seen soccer; I'm certain the telecast was ruined long before the AI got involved...

  • We need things like this at this time. Seems the AI had an infatuation with the ref.

    That was the funniest thing I've seen in a while. I laughed, I cried, then I kept crying because I was laughing so much.

    Seriously, need a pick me up? This video is it.

  • "Super Caley" (Score:5, Funny)

    by The Grassy Knoll ( 112931 ) on Monday November 02, 2020 @08:51AM (#60674972)

    Ah, Inverness Caledonian Thistle - famous for the wonderful headline in The Sun, the day after they beat Celtic 3-1 at Parkhead (in 2000):
    "Super Caley Go Ballistic, Celtic Are Atrocious"

    .

  • No manual override; no one paying attention. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 02, 2020 @09:01AM (#60675008)
    The real bug in the system design is that there is no manual override - where someone with a joystick can aim the camera, if necessary. At least Teslas have a driver -- except when the car runs into the back of a fire engine or when the driver is playing a game on his iPhone.
    • You cannot with absolute certainty say that Autopilot 'has a driver'. People get bored and check out. Even if they're looking at the road they're not as effective as they would be if they were already driving.

    • It was obviously a way to lower crew costs. And it's awesome! They should have a manual camera person for replays to see what actually happened.

  • It's football actually. (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 02, 2020 @09:08AM (#60675026)

    This is in Scotland. The sport played with a ball controlled with your feet is called football everywhere outside the US. The one more familiar to the US audience is referred to as "American Football" or handegg if you want to be more literal (or "Rugby for pussies" if you want to be more colourful).

    • The sport played with a ball controlled with your feet is called football everywhere outside the US.

      No; in Australia it's called soccer because, unlike in the US, we play football here.

    • The sport you play is called, assocciation football. It came from the same sport we have in the US

    • Until fairly recently, "Soccer" was an acceptable term in Britain. Look at a British newspaper about the 1966 world cup final and you'll see plenty of mentions of "soccer players".
  • This is perfect. It's like a reverse Cast Away.

  • I, for one, welcome our new bald-head worshipping robot overlords.

  • The results of AI systems is dependent on the quality of the training data. When we find it misbehaving, we are just discovering new training data to make it better for next time.

    One of my favorite go to comments is that one day we will have amazing self driving cars, they just need to make a billion mistakes first.

  • ...two things can look exactly the same, yet be very different. Here the ways in which humans distinguish balls from heads:

    location on the field
    speed of movement
    interaction with others
    ballistic acceleration
    the focus of literally everyone in the building

    Pro tip: if you happen to lose track of the ball, just see which way the ref is looking.

    • ..Pro tip: if you happen to lose track of the ball, just see which way the ref is looking.

      You mean, see which way the ball is looking.

  • ...then that's it folks! It will fold over night.

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