Milwaukee Bucks' Damian Lillard shoots for two points during the second half of an NBA basketball game against the Atlanta Hawks, on Oct. 29, in Milwaukee.Kenny Yoo/The Associated Press
A while back, I corresponded with a bunch of futurists about what sports would look like decades from now.
Most were thinking incrementally (sound-stage stadiums, the return of bloodsport). Syd Mead, the guy behind the look of Blade Runner and Aliens, was thinking bigger.
“I see American football as being played by huge robotic duplicates of celebrated athletes, both current and deceased,” Mead wrote, in part.
I know enough to know I know nothing, but this still struck me as a bit out there.
Since then, Mead has been looking more and more on the mark. Sports broadcasting took another small step on the way to his humanity-free content future this past week.
After an early season win by the Milwaukee Bucks, ESPN put out a clip on its socials featuring new Bucks star Damian Lillard.
Lillard is standing on an empty court in his Milwaukee uniform. There’s crowd murmur in the background.
“Ain’t nothing I want more,” he says to someone off-screen. “I told you when I first come here, I ain’t come here to waste my time.”
The caption yells at you – “DIDN’T COME TO MILWAUKEE TO WASTE HIS TIME.”
If you look carefully at the clip there is something uncanny about it, but who looks at things carefully any more? It’s just another brief hit of content amidst the endless scroll.
Lillard did say this, but not last week and not in a Milwaukee jersey. He said it three years ago. ESPN redrew the court and the uniform, and erased the interviewer. The clear intent was to fool people into thinking it had just happened.
The real beauty of this was the explanation provided later.
“We occasionally look to connect sports moments of the past with contemporary imagery and storylines as part of our social content,” ESPN told Sports Media Watch. “While it was never our intention to misrepresent anything for fans, we completely recognize how this instance caused confusion.”
Can you spot an apology in there? Me neither. The simpler way of saying this is, ‘Yeah, so what?’
This isn’t how it starts. It started a while ago. This is how it continues.
Athletes cost a lot of money, have a tendency to break down and never do exactly what you want them to. They were so busy learning how to hit the corner of the net or catch touchdowns that they often have a poor understanding of dramatic effect. They don’t know what, how or when to say things.
So why not choose what they say for them?
Actually, if you’re headed down that road, why not remove them from the equation entirely? Why not have an avatar of a face you recognize guided by a team of storytellers, psychologists and designers? Damian Lillard is a talented guy, but he can’t compete with a writers’ room working full-time to come up with the best lines for ‘Damian Lillard.’
Better yet, what about replacing Real Lillard with AI Lillard? Real Lillard is in his third act – 33 years old, making a big move for the championship he’s never gotten anywhere near. Real Lillard is on the clock.
AI Lillard can theoretically play forever (and also earn forever for Real Lillard). As long as his story is interesting, people will tune in to watch AI Lillard connect sports moments of the past with contemporary imagery for a donkey’s age. In a hundred years, AI Lillard can still be playing for the Off-World Colonies Otters.
We’ve spent the past half-century training people to accept heroes who are not, strictly speaking, human.
On the low-tech end, that involves publicists, press agents and global brands. No very-famous person that you know talks off the top of their head. Very few say what they think. But they are speaking all the time, trying to say things that will make the right people like them, or the wrong people hate them. It’s kind of the same thing.
For the modern personal brand, image is reality. We continue to pretend to be shocked when we discover the two things do not align, but less and less. We have accepted that you do not need to fake it until you make it. You need to fake it long after you make it. The only acceptable reason to stop faking it is when you lose market traction. Then its time to cash in one last time by telling your truth, which still isn’t the truth. The truth will always be too complicated to package for the mass market.
On the high-tech end, we can now create people from whole cloth. They may never exist anywhere but on a screen, but that no longer matters.
Most of the people who love Lionel Messi could not say to an absolute certainty that he is a real person. They only know him from their TVs. Like Bugs Bunny or Bojack Horseman.
In digitally repurposing that interview with Lillard, ESPN took a baby step into a new paradigm for sports broadcasting.
The only people who complained were sports journalists, and not because it’s wrong. We complained because it’s an encroachment on our dwindling professional patch.
All in all, you’d call it a success. A lot of spread, with limited blowback. The biggest sports network in the world pulled a deep fake with one of the most famous athletes in North America and the reaction was, ‘Hilarious!’
You do not have to stretch your mind too hard to see a world in which this is standard operating procedure. Real Lillard plays and AI Lillard talks about it. Real Lillard retires and AI Lillard starts playing simulated games with AI Allen Iverson and AI Gary Payton. It’s Mead’s future, minus the maintenance cost for robots.
People already gather online in their millions to watch strangers play video games. How is watching players who aren’t real competing virtually any different?
When you start adding up the positives (total control of the sports environment, an on-demand product never interrupted by injury, cost certainty, etc.) against the negatives (nobody likes a fake), Mead’s prediction comes off as more than prescient. It starts to seem like his real mistake was thinking too small.
Cathal Kelly