Key Points
Bullet point summary by AI
- NBA Commissioner Adam Silver announced a major shift in how certain game decisions will be made in the future.
- The plan involves replacing human referees with technology for specific, objective calls to eliminate inconsistency.
- Fans remain skeptical that automated decisions will resolve long-standing concerns about bias and accuracy in officiating.
Listen, Adam Silver heard you. He heard your complaints about the refereeing throughout these NBA Playoffs, the confusion on crucial late-game calls, the propensity for certain players to draw fouls with unnatural shooting motions and what appears to be relentless flopping. Adam Silver heard you and he said ... hey, NBA fans, hold my beer.
In a Wednesday appearance on post-modern media hellscape The Pat McAfee Show, Silver announced that many borderline calls will eventually be made by AI-powered video systems.
“We're going to move to a system like that where that whole category of calls will be automatic, where it's going to be Laker ball, Knick ball, whatever it is, Thunder ball. Those calls will be done by an AI-automated system with cameras lined around the court, and it'll take all of those so-called objective calls out of the hands of the referees. It'll be instantaneous, it'll be automatic. Just play on.”
I am sure NBA fans will be reassured that the first three hypothetical examples Silver came up with off the dome were "Laker ball, Knick ball, whatever it is, Thunder ball." Way to smother the conspiratorial flames of ambient favoritism toward certain teams, Adam, bravo.
In fairness to Silver, the "whole category of calls" he's talking about are out-of-bounds calls. (Until we achieve AGI, we can't possible trust a computer to decide if Shai Egregious-Alexander was actually fouled on a play like this.) In unfairness to Silver, this is a terrible idea and he should absolutely know better.
AI is ruining so many industries why not let it ruin NBA refereeing also?
I will admit to some bias here — my thoughts on current applications of AI technology are probably best summed up in this Ed Zitron paragraph:
"AI is a perfect storm of failed concepts and organizations, and the apex of the Era of the Business Idiot, an epoch where we’re ruled by people so thoroughly disconnected from the actual workforce that it was inevitable that a technology would be created specifically to grift them."
Maybe some present-day or near-future AI technology could more accurately judge whether a ball is inbounds or out-of-bounds and which player touched it last. I am not willing to concede that point but let's take it as a hypoothetical. Will NBA fans trust this fact and be convinced by it? Will it remove the perceived ambiguity inherent in split-second collisions elite athletes? Will it keep NBA fans of from complaining about bias against their teams specifically or NBA officiating generally?
No. No. And also no.
Recent research by the Pew Institute indicates that Americans have a negative view of how AI will impact every key industry included in the sample, other than medical care. They don't trust it generally and in judging future out-of-bounds calls they're like to trust it only so far as it confirms their priors — if they thought the ball was out of bounds off LeBron, they'll trust an AI call that says that's what happened, and not trust an AI call that doesn't.
It's well established that AI systems can include inherent bias when it's baked into their model. For an NBA fan who thinks Thunder players get the benefit of the doubt from human referees, it's an easy leap to assuming an automated model has the same bias built in.
The issue here is that AI provides a veneer of hyper-accuracy that's almost always not in evidence AND it doesn't even solve the real problem. The NBA doesn't have a problem with officiating accuracy — by their own numbers their refs get between 92 and 95 percent of calls correct. NBA fans aren't complaining about that 5-8 percent. They're complaining from a perspective that the true error rate is much, much higher.
An AI out-of-bounds system doesn't touch that perspective, it just gives fans a different hypothetical failure point to blame. It substitutes one problem for another. But it's not surprising given we've been watching the league flail for two decades trying to solve tanking and fix the All-Star Game — exchanging one bad idea for another novel one. Maybe basketball is a sport and sports are chaotic and getting everything right is impossible. More right is a noble goal but I don't think that's really what Adam Silver is after and I don't think that's really what he's going to get.
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