Incident 80: AI mistakes referee’s bald head for football — hilarity ensued

Description: In a Scottish soccer match the AI-enabled ball-tracking camera used to livestream the game repeatedly tracked an official’s bald head as though it were the soccer ball.

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Alleged: unknown developed an AI system deployed by Inverness Caledonian Thistle Football Club, which harmed livestream viewers.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
80
Report Count
2
Incident Date
2020-10-24
Editors
Sean McGregor, Khoa Lam

CSET Taxonomy Classifications

Taxonomy Details

Full Description

Scottish soccer team Inverness Caledonian Thistle Football Club uses cameras with AI ball-tracking to livestream their matches on YouTube. In a 2020 match against Ayr United, a camera repeatedly tracked an official’s bald head, thinking it was the soccer ball.

Short Description

In a Scottish soccer match the AI-enabled ball-tracking camera used to livestream the game repeatedly tracked an official’s bald head as though it were the soccer ball.

Severity

Negligible

Harm Type

Psychological harm

AI System Description

AI ball-tracking techology using video feed to determine and follow a ball in order to keep the game in focus

System Developer

Unknown

Sector of Deployment

Arts, entertainment and recreation

Relevant AI functions

Perception, Cognition, Action

AI Techniques

supervised learning

AI Applications

image classification, image recognition

Location

Inverness, Scotland, UK

Named Entities

Inverness Caledonian Thistle Football Club, Ayr United, YouTube

Technology Purveyor

Inverness Caledonian Thistle Football Club

Beginning Date

2020-10-24T07:00:00.000Z

Ending Date

2020-10-24T07:00:00.000Z

Near Miss

Harm caused

Intent

Accident

Lives Lost

No

Data Inputs

video feed, pre-tagged soccer match imagery

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.

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