ESPN will current the NBA Christmas Day sport between the New York Knicks and San Antonio Spurs because the debut NB-AI occasion which turns gamers similar to Jalen Brunson and Victor Wembanyama into cartoons in dwell time alongside the likes of Disney characters Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.
The considerably weird occasion was introduced by ESPN as a collaboration between it, the NBA, and Disney, and would be the first full use of the synthetic intelligence generated NB-AI which was revealed in March, coming from Sony’s Beyond Sports expertise.
Dunk the Halls shall be a totally animated (and non-compulsory) model of the sport which transforms Madison Square Garden into Main Street, USA from Disney World and gamers into cartoon characters. They’ll be cheered alongside from the sidelines by Disney icons, whereas followers can watch on ESPN2, Disney+, and ESPN+.
This Christmas, we’re fulfilling Mickey’s one want 💫
The Disney Dunk the Halls broadcast of Spurs-Knicks streams dwell on Christmas Day on ESPN2, ESPN+ and Disney+ 🏀 pic.twitter.com/zPLHxMrSps
— ESPN (@espn) November 20, 2024
“Each Spurs and Knicks participant will seem as a motion-enabled, animated participant for the particular Christmas matchup,” ESPN mentioned. “Through state-of-the-art real-time visualization expertise enabled by Sony’s Beyond Sports, mixed with Sony’s Hawk-Eye Innovations’ optical monitoring, followers watching Dunk the Halls will see each three-pointer, dunk, layup, move and extra from the real-life Spurs vs. Knicks sport at Madison Square Garden in New York because it occurs.”
Mickey Mouse and mates may have a slam dunk contest at halftime too, whereas Santa’s elves function the cameras and different Disney characters ship pregame and halftime speeches. Fans may also learn the way many churros Goofy can eat.
AI has confirmed a controversial subject in leisure and the NBA has already confronted criticism for utilizing it. NBA commissioner Adam Silver debuted a trial of the expertise throughout a tech summit at All Star Weekend in February, exhibiting a sport “as if it had been a Spider-Man film.”
The sport become one thing akin to the Spider-Verse sequence, prompting Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse co-producer Christopher Miller to name out the expertise and seemingly query if the information was harvested legally.
“I’m an enormous NBA fan, and I really like that individuals are enthusiastic about Spider-Verse, however this janky-ass AI appears nothing just like the hand-crafted modern artistry of the movies,” Miller mentioned on the time. “For the file, so far as I do know they by no means reached out to us about ‘scraping’ the movies’ fashion.”
Elsewhere within the leisure world, Tim Burton referred to as AI generated artwork “very disturbing” in September 2023 whereas Wizards of the Coast was pressured to situation a correction in January 2024 after claiming it did not use AI for some Magic: The Gathering art work when it truly did.
Several online game voice actors have additionally rallied in opposition to AI, together with Grand Theft Auto 5 voice actor Ned Luke who referred to as out a chatbot which used his voice. The Witcher voice actor Doug Cockle additionally informed IGN that AI was “inevitable” however “harmful”, sharing in Luke’s evaluation that chatbots and related makes use of are “successfully robbing [voice actors] of earnings”.
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll speak about The Witcher all day.
