We Can Animate Movies Now — What About Sports?

We May Soon Be Watching "Avletes" Compete

Most likely, you’ll never meet the celebrities you see on TV or online. If you’re like the rest of us, you won’t brunch with Tom Hanks. You won’t sip cocktails with LeBron James or attend a party with Taylor Swift. This reality prompts a question: if you won’t ever interact with any of these exemplars in real life (IRL), how do you even know they are real??

Bet you weren’t expecting this article to go to the?Twilight Zone!?

Before going full-on mind-bendy, let’s acknowledge some of our brightest minds have also questioned reality, especially as more information about quantum physics has emerged.?

Take Tesla/SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.?

He recently espoused his belief in the?Simulation Hypothesis, comparing life to a video game: “If you assume any rate of improvement at all, games will eventually be indistinguishable from reality,” Musk?said?before concluding, “We’re most likely in a simulation.”?

Renowned astrophysicist and host of?Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey,?Neil DeGrasse Tyson?agrees. “I find it hard to argue against that possibility, he?told?interviewer Larry King.

?Whether we are living in a simulation or not, one thing is clear. We can now simulate reality on a nearly unimaginable scale. Consider?Deepfakes. Unfamiliar with the concept? Here’s how?The Guardian?explains it: “The 21st century’s answer to Photoshopping, deepfakes use a form of artificial intelligence called deep learning to make images of fake events, hence the name deepfake.”

One of the most famous examples occurred last year when an AI-powered voice generator called Play.ht generated an entirely?ersatz conversation?between the late Apple founder Steve Jobs and podcaster Joe Rogan.?

An unsettling phenomenon, deepfakes deserves to be a separate article topic in its own right—especially the?dangers?it poses, such as pornography. Spoiler alert: our laws have not caught up with this fast-evolving technology.

For now, knowing we have become so adept at creating simulations to boggle the mind and the senses, why not produce simulated sports? To put it another way, throughout history we have been entertained by other humans. (Think:?Roman Colosseum games?and?American vaudeville.)?

Nowadays we are entertained by code.?

Returning to the top of this article, if there’s a good chance you’ll never meet your sports heroes anyway, would you really mind that they are… not real? Or, to use Musk’s phraseology: simulated?

This is our thought exercise, and not an idle one, either. For if we can already imagine some new innovation, it’s a good bet someone or some organization is already working to produce it.?

First, let’s consider the many sports injuries that?occur yearly, especially in high-contact games. As President of?GameChanger, an app designed to digitally complement IRL playing, I’ve heard from families concerned about these risks. When we are designing athletes with code, this danger goes away.

But there’s yet another advantage of enabling digitally rendered bits of code to entertain us: tomorrow’s competitors, which I shall hereafter dub?Avletes?(combining the words avatar with athlete) will be able to perform in jaw-dropping ways no human can possibly do now.

Remember how sick the action moves looked in?The Matrix?the first time you saw it? (Or even now—the 1999 film still holds up.) It’s 100% conceivable we’ll soon watch?avletes?defy all known laws of physics: running up walls and ceilings, outrunning bullets or other projectiles, leapfrogging from skyscraper to skyscraper—if not from planet to planet or star to star when we take sports off-world. (Yes, this would be possible too, in our brave new future.)

Beyond astounding visuals, here’s another consideration.?

Today’s professional sports are largely centralized. Various leagues, including the NFL for football and the NBA for basketball, offer the infrastructure we associate with popular athletics. Could some of these trends offer credible competition to the NFL, NBA, MBA??

There is precedence for such a turn of events.

Just a few decades ago, the American public got their news and entertainment from just three channels. Then market forces disrupted their business model, forever upending how we view television content.?

Or as Karlyn Bowman writes for?Forbes, “CBS, NBC, and ABC have lost the central role they had in delivering the news for an obvious reason: People have more choices. In 1985, the average home got 18 channels. In 2007, it was more than 118. We've had 24-hour news available since CNN started broadcasting it in 1980.”

Importantly, Bowman’s article was published in 2009. It was only a scant three years after?Time Magazine?crowned?us?“Persons of the Year” due to the rise of user-created content on sites like Facebook and YouTube.?

Back then, TikTok was but a gleam in some developer’s eye. Ditto for the Metaverse. Before Mark Zuckerberg renamed his company Meta to capitalize on ubiquitous virtual reality, it was still just an intriguing concept from Neil Stephenson’s 1992 sci-fi novel?Snowcrash.

In the same way user-generated content and the rise of “influencer” culture has dethroned legacy media, including network/cable TV, the movie industry, and even news/journalism, we can expect something similar in sports. Should creators soon be able to create their own?avletes, we may be looking at an analogous situation.?

Running with this idea, before long, content creators may not need to ask behemoths like the NFL and the like for permission to compete in professional sports. Instead, anyone with a phone or computer with a WIFI connection could generate their own?avletes.?

That’s not all. Decentralized content creators could invent their own their leagues, their own tournaments, their own rules—they could even create their own sports. Maybe professional skyscraper jumping? Ceiling running decathlons? I’ll let you use your imagination…

Since we now live and compete in the?Attention Economy, we must ask, what will it do to professional sports when millions who now tune into spectacles like the World Series, instead switch their focus to some other anticipated?avlete?contest? For precedence on this cultural disruption, consider how international League of Legends tournaments already draw many,?many more eyeballs?than the Superbowl.

Undoubtedly, a market shall remain for sports purists and the like who?refuse to watch any game without humans. That’s to be expected and I understand their mentality. It is, after all, what I grew up with, and presumably you did, too. However, as we know,?change?is life’s only constant.?

And if the last few years have shown us anything, it’s how fast reality can change.

Thank you for reading. If you like what you just read, please subscribe for more content at consumeatonce.substack.com. We write about how technology is transforming how we create and consume sports, movies, videos, TV, games, and social media. Any opinions or forecasts contained herein reflect the personal and subjective judgments and assumptions of the author only.?