Over*Flow: Effort is Overrated: The Dissonance of AI Integrations with the 2024 Olympic Games
Kathryn Hartzell / University of Texas at Austin
In the summer of 2024, the Olympics — the world’s largest media event dedicated to finding and rewarding the limits of human physicality — became a marketing blitz for the biggest players in artificial intelligence. Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Salesforce’s AI, Meta, and more spent a reported $196 million in marketing through August 8, 2024. NBC’s coverage, on broadcast, cable, and OTT player Peacock, was filled with advertisements for products that could help users artificially surpass their previous limits. Even as sports journalists continued to talk about doping concerns, the Olympic’s official AI partner Intel assured athletes that AI would take them to the next level. The dissonance created by these contrasting narratives highlights ongoing tensions around AI’s relationship to creativity. Moreover, the buzzy deployments of AI during the Olympics actually support concerns about how AI will increase precarity in the media industries, support the technologies and infrastructure of “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff 2020), and the further exploitation of the Global South (Swadowski 2019).
Corporations, governments, and advocacy organizations have a long history of using sporting mega events to generate consensus around divisive issues (Katz and Daya, 2000; Roche 2006). Events like the Olympics are also tentpoles for the “Sport-media-advertising-promotional-cultural complex” (Jackson and Andrews 2025). The large consumer audiences media companies are able to deliver as well as the levels of excitement generated by “live” competition provide corporations with an opportunity to launder their image and associate themselves with positive communal experiences. Facing criticism from Wall Street for their lack of profitability, and more broadly for their labor and environmental impacts, the world’s largest tech companies used the Olympics as a staging ground to regain public trust and to stave off threats of regulation. Google Gemini’s critically reviled “Dear Sydney” ad illustrated the difficulty of this task.
In the ad, a young fan wants to write a letter to her sporting hero, track star Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. However, the girl’s father asks Google Gemini to write the letter for her. The implication that AI could better express the sentiments of a child incited a maelstrom of negative press online that ultimately drove Google to pause comments under the video. After some initial defensiveness, Google pulled the ad out of its advertising rotation. However, with few exceptions, there was little criticism of other AI ad campaigns, experiments, and integrations.
One of the most buzzy AI features at the Olympics was NBC’s AI event highlight reader, voiced by legendary sportscaster Al Michaels. New York Magazine’s Vulture criticized the experiment’s inability to capture genuine emotion; however, the Washington Post called it “surprisingly good.” As one of the most prestigious events in the world, journalists consider securing a contract to cover the Olympics a milestone achievement. But in one move, NBC demonstrated the precarity of these positions. With AI, veterans can continue in their posts into retirement and ultimately past death, thus denying other journalists these opportunities. Even if it is unlikely that sportscaster jobs could be completely handled by AI, this feature portends a bleak future for journalism. Newspapers and magazines have already begun experimenting with AI services to write stories. Lede AI generated bizarre recaps of high school sporting events for Gannett newspapers. AdVon Commerce created AI journalists for Sports Illustrated. Although both these incidents were regarded as public failures, or at least temporarily embarrassed their publishers, more experiments are sure to follow. Other AI integrations into the Olympics coverage asked professional journalists to read out Google Gemini summaries of lesser known Olympic events such as the Pentathlon. While physical records in speed, strength, and endurance were being tested on the field, NBC publicly showcased the redundancy of human knowledge production and undermined their own experts.
The praise for some of NBC’s experiments, such as A.I. AI Michaels, is perhaps even more surprising coming after 2023’s labor summer when writers and actors attempted to put roadblocks on their own exploitation by AI technologies. The use of AI in creating “digital replicas” of actors’ likenesses and voices without permission was a specific item in the union contract negotiations. The Hollywood strikes pushed a more critical narrative about AI, lambasting its theft of writers and actors work in its training data without compensation (a practice that is continuing) and writers and actors highlighted fears that AI would be used to build upon their early work to help corporations get around paying them for rewrites or extra shoots. Going into the summer of 2024, a YouGov survey found that 54% U.S. Americans were “cautious” about AI and 49% shared they were “concerned.”
At the Olympics, tech companies attempted to pivot away from these criticisms and inspire more positive public sentiment by pushing the narrative that, in the words of one evangelist, AI is “democratizing creativity” by acting as a leveler to allow “individuals without formal training or experience to express themselves in ways previously unimaginable.” Microsoft Copilot and Meta’s ads both showed AI providing helpful advice to people on how to create workout plans tailored to their specific needs, such as an older woman and a pregnant woman. The Copilot ad also featured a father with a busy business day using AI to summarize his calls so that he could train his son in boxing. Google Gemini sponsored videos of comedian and Olympics superfan Leslie Jones asking the AI to guide her Olympic dreams.
The messaging of AI’s egalitarian ambitions, largely developed to counter the Hollywood labor’s anti-AI stance, generated dissonance within the Olympics’ televisual flow. Not only do the Olympics celebrate the limits of human bodily achievement, the U.S. coverage was also fixated on the Chinese swimming doping scandal. Sportscasters stoked ire at athletes who use performance enhancing drugs to compete against the natural gifts and years of intense dedication of “clean” athletes. Olympic stories of athletes’ diligent training, personal sacrifice, and bodily suffering made AI’s promise to get less motivated “normal” people into competitive shape feel like cheating.
Working to counteract the “cheating” analogy, Joseph Ruck, a Vice President of Ambi Robotics, penned an AI Olympic allegory for Forbes, titled “The AI Olympics: Why Human Marketers Are Still Bringing Home The Gold.” Ruck argued “performance enhancing tech” was better analogized to world class infrastructure and training facilities. Though he doesn’t shy away from the message that AI tools “democratized access to basic marketing skills,” he marries these “basics” with the continued need for human emotional intelligence (something clearly missing from the “Dear Sydney” campaign). Ruck’s article also showcased that AI influence on the Olympics went beyond the ad products themselves but into the process of crafting and designing a marketing campaign. This fusion was perhaps best displayed by Etoro Financial’s ad featuring a cast of AI generated “investors” rendered as attractive, young, and cosmopolitan. The presence of these digital simulacra against the “live” spectacularization of athletic bodies created even more visual dissonance within the Olympic telecasts. Ruck’s rhetoric positioned AI as a tool, but its use by Etoro promised a superior post-human world (as well as the redundancy of actors).
The material use of AI also extended to the International Olympic Committee (IOC)’s event logistics and production services. Official Olympic AI Platform Partner Intel created an AI chatbot to help Olympians navigate the Olympic village. They also integrated AI into “storytelling” by building AI to clip content, create highlights, tag metadata, generate captions and subtitles, and create graphics. Sarah Vickers from Intel suggested AI would continue to enhance viewership by allowing for greater personalization: “The new advancements in AI at Paris 2024 are likely to set trends for how AI is used in sport and other industries worldwide for years to come.”
The virtues of AI, however, did not stop at broadcasting efficiencies. AI discourse from Tech companies, NBC, the IOC, and the advertising trades was awash in speculative language about future solutions for seemingly all of society’s ills. For instance, The IOC’s “Olympic AI Agenda” includes phrases such as “ground-breaking opportunity for the global accessibility of sport,” “mission for solidarity and inclusivity,” and “AI to promote solidarity, further digitalisation, improve sustainability and resilience.” However, while invoking terms like “inclusivity” and “sustainability,” AI’s stakeholders often failed to address how AI was being deployed to achieve these goals. Intel’s chatbot, for example, was created for the use of athletes from over 200 counties. When asked if the chatbot spoke all the participating athletes’ languages, Sarah Vickers “wasn’t sure.” Google meanwhile used “accessibility” to refer simply to providing summaries of unfamiliar sporting events to interested viewers.
Instead, many of the AI deployments in Paris furthered goals of visualization and surveillance. Google Gemini, for example, was integrated with Google Lens and Google Maps to help shepherd spectators and athletes around Paris and encourage them to post to NBC’s social media. A platform was created to monitor hate speech and abuse directed toward participating athletes on social media. Intel and Samsung also created an app that would allow users to identify athletes on the field. In Paris, Intel launched an activation to demonstrate their advancements in the capture and processing of biometric data. Sponsored by Intel, tech YouTuber Patrick Kennedy of Serve The Home traveled to Paris to create a video demonstrating the Intel AI Platform Experience in which users were guided through some physical activities and in return were told which sport they were best suited for. As the YouTube video makes clear, Intel’s AI demonstration is about “Computer Vision,” or the ability to transform digital video of human bodies into detailed biometric data more seamlessly than technologies like motion capture. This technology is already being deployed to help scout athletic talent.
In one of Intel’s promotional videos for its “AI Talent ID” technology, a White Englishman discusses how Intel provided this technology to the Senegalese National Olympic Committee to help them identify talent. The video then visualizes the Black youth athletes participating in various athletic activities as data points are superimposed over their bodies. In the Serve The Home video, Patrick Kennedy positions this scouting feature as furthering goals of inclusivity by allowing athletes in Senegal to pursue sports like kayaking that they might never have considered. However, the technology continues a legacy of colonial surveillance and taxonimization of Black and Brown bodies (Dixon-Román & Ramon Amaro 2021). It also continues the imperial project of exploiting Black and Brown sporting talent by Western professional leagues (Darby 2001; Runstedtler 2018).
Finally, discourses of “sustainability” were divorced from AI’s environmental toll. The materiality of AI is largely sourced from countries in the Global South. From the mining of rare minerals, to its use of water, to the emissions from its datacenters, AI is currently consuming an alarming amount of raw material. In Alibaba’s press statement about its partnership with the IOC, the company touts how its AI platform will monitor electricity consumption during the Olympics which will translate, sometime in the future, into more efficient energy infrastructures. However, it also describes how Alibaba has supported the migration of distribution from satellites to the cloud without discussing the environmental impact of datacenters. As Toby Miller (2025) discusses, “greenwashing” relies on a myth of sustainability as perpetuated by corporate social responsibility (CS) initiatives. CSR works to build public confidence in polluters and assure the public that they can regulate themselves.
AI technologies are certainly revolutionizing life and work. However, rather than pointing to the promise of AI in fields like diagnostics, the Olympics presented AI as the on-coming post-human future where human bodies, intellect, and even emotion can be quantified, captured, and reproduced. Although rhetorically invoking equality and diversity, the small number of companies racing for market supremacy outlined the oligarchical structure of the tech field and its global ambitions.
Image Credits:
- AI Olympic Ads (Author’s Screenshot of Google Search Results)
- Google Gemini’s “Dear Sydney” Advertisement
- Etoro Financial generates the image of savvy global investors
- Serve The Home demonstrates the Intel AI Platform Experience
- Senegalese National Olympic Committee and Intel use AI to find sporting talent
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