A chat with Shohei? This tech firm is pitching an AI version of baseball's biggest stars
CBC
How would you like to have a one-on-one friendship with your favourite professional baseball player? A California-based tech company is pitching exactly that — by building AI avatars of every Major League Baseball star.
The AI firm Genies recently signed an intellectual property deal with MLB Players Inc. — the business arm of the Major League Baseball Players Association — to create a cartoon-like "companion" version of every player on the league's roster.
Once the product officially launches, baseball fans will supposedly be able to hold a conversation with the avatars on the Genies website, where they can ask a player to explain a gametime decision or chat about a home run that happened 10 seconds earlier.
"This isn't actually Shohei Ohtani," said Akash Nigam, the CEO and founder of Genies, in an interview with CBC News. "This is his Genie, and his Genie happens to know everything about him. And it's kind of like his little sidekick that you can get to know."
The project illustrates how the fan-celebrity relationship is evolving in step with advancements in artificial intelligence, especially as companies look for opportunities to capitalize on intellectual property through valuable licensing agreements.
The deal between Genies and MLB Players. Inc is a catch-all, meaning it includes every single player in the MLB. Trading card deals and partnerships with sports-related video games are also structured as blanket agreements, according to one lawyer.
"It would be really inefficient to have to go and turn around to every athlete and start to negotiate to allow them to be on a trading card," said Dave Stern, partner and head of the sports and entertainment law group at Blaney McMurtry LLP in Toronto.
If a player is going to be depicted in a video game or as an avatar no matter what, some might choose to be actively involved in shaping the rendering, noted Stern, so that they're "meaningfully consulted" throughout the process and can maintain some control over their image.
That doesn't mean every MLB player will be happy with a deal like this.
"We don't know how [the avatars] are going to interact, and some players might exercise certain rights and might protest a deal like this and their involvement through MLB Players Inc."
Rather than building the "brain" behind artificial intelligence — Genies runs its technology on large language models from OpenAI, ElevenLabs and Google — the company's mission is to give AI a "face" and deepen one-on-one relationships between celebrities and their fans, according to Nigam.
"Typically, a relationship between an artist or an athlete and their fan base is either through their music, their games or on social media. And the problem is that it's a one-to-many relationship," he said.
For people with strong boundaries, having a one-sided relationship with a celebrity isn't necessarily negative, said Lynn Zubernis, a clinical psychologist and professor at West Chester University in Philadelphia who researches the psychology of fandom.
"If you're a Taylor Swift fan and Taylor Swift is killing it out there, you feel really good, too, even though you're not the one that's out there. Similar with football teams," she explained.
