AI has undeniably made progress; systems like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion are impressive, surprising, and fun to play with. We can all agree on that. But can the current state of AI be criticized? A lot of recent media accounts have tried to stick AI critics in a little box. Scientists like the linguist

Many existing sports have their roots in hundreds (if not thousands) of years of human tradition. But what if you asked computers to create a sport? You now know how that can turn out. The design agency AKQA has introduced Speedgate, reportedly the first sport envisioned by an AI. The event has six-player teams competing on a field with three open-ended gates.

At TechCrunch, we write about AI all the time, whether the technology is being used to write books, make films or create a better McDonald's drive-thru. But here's one we haven't heard before: using AI to invent a new sport. The sport in question is Speedgate, and it was developed by AKQA. Creative Director Whitney Jenkins explained that the digital agency wanted to do something "really ambitious" for Portland Design Week, and given the team's work with Nike (and its general "love of sports or athleticism"), it made sense to ask: "What if we invented the next basketball, the next football?" To do that, AKQA says it used an existing recurrent neural network architecture, feeding it data about 400 sports, which were then used to generate sports concepts and rules.

Snowboarders are pulled by a drone on a lake near Cesis, Latvia, in January. Snowboarders are pulled by a drone on a lake near Cesis, Latvia, in January. You may have heard of drone racing, but people keep coming up with new ways to enjoy these flying machines. One of the latest twists on drone sports comes from Latvia. A company called Aerones has developed a drone to use for droneboarding, a new sport that's just what it sounds like -- a snowboarder being pulled through the snow by a powerful drone.

With rotors and radios, we are witnessing the birth of a new sport. Aerial acrobatics, sharp turns and staggering climbs that NASCAR can only imagine, all done on the cheap with toys and remote controls, from woods to warehouses to special courses in Dubai. Welcome to the new age of drone racing, as it moves from backyards to broadcasts. Today, ESPN announced it will livestream the U.S. National Drone Racing Championships, a 3-day drone racing event held on New York City's Governor's Island in early August. And then, in October, ESPN will cover the 2016 World Drone Racing Championships at Kualoa Ranch, Hawaii. The drones are flown by pilots wearing goggles and watching through first person vision cameras.