As the countdown to the Paris 2024 Olympic Games continues, efforts are intensifying among the event organizers ahead of the event on July 26. The Olympics will see the introduction of a new player: generative artificial intelligence. Last Friday, International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach announced that the IOC will deploy AI to combat the abuse of social media directed at 15,000 athletes and officials during the Paris Olympics next month. As the Games commence, over 10,500 athletes will compete in 32 sports, resulting in more than half a billion interactions on social media.
How will AI be used? The AI system aims to protect athletes by monitoring offensive posts and automatically deleting them, providing widespread protection against online abuse. This initiative comes amid ongoing global conflicts that may lead to harmful use of social networks due to severe divisions in the world, including the ongoing war in Ukraine and the conflict in Gaza.
Russian and Belarusian athletes, who will compete as neutral athletes without their national flags, are included in these preventive measures. The IOC has not specified what level of access athletes will need to grant for the AI monitoring.
