AI Judging in Sports

The Hawk-Eye computer vision system made its tennis debut in 2003 for broadcasting purposes, but was approved in 2005 after a notorious U.S. Open Tennis match between Serena Williams and Jennifer Capriati in 2004, during which Williams was the victim of multiple bad calls in the third set and went on to lose the match. Use of Hawk-Eye was expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the 2020 U.S. Open was played without line judges on all but two of the main courts. Since Hawk-Eye has been in use, between 190 and 200 judges have been replaced, depending on the stage of the tournament, says Sean Carey, managing director of competition operations, at the U.S. Tennis Association (USTA). "The reason we bring technology in for this level of tournament--and we want to do it across every level if we could afford it--is to ensure integrity and the fairest and most even calls,'' Carey said. Hawk-Eye, which uses cameras to track the trajectory of a ball and create a three-dimensional (3D) representation of it, is now being used by 23 of the top 25 global sports leagues and federations, according to the company. Yet, the sentiment appears to be that AI will never fully replace human judges. This has been the subject of much debate in Major League Baseball (MLB), a sport grounded in tradition, noted Daniel Martin, an associate professor of economics at the University of California at Santa Barbara. MLB is using Hawk-Eye to automatically monitor strike zones, and is questioning whether to get rid of umpires, given that the system is "incredibly accurate,'' he said.