Taking ourselves out of the driver's seat
Formula 1 teams are actively ceding control to AI; they're not alone
There’s a popular argument that in a world where AI has freed us from the drudgery of work (by some means other than killing us all), we would fill our days with creativity and sport. The unspoken assumption is that we would pursue these things unassisted — that our raw humanity would be the whole point.
Recent developments tell me this will only happen if people aggressively police these pursuits for AI intrusions. Because, like steroids, players and fans may collectively prefer that AI not be used, but individual teams, players, and creatives will cheat if they can get away with it — and may even feel like they have to, just to compete.
Formula 1 seems to be wrestling with this issue right now in the form of AI-controlled “engine mapping.” While the AI-assisted version is new, engine mapping is not: It refers to on-the-fly adjustments made to engine parameters during the race to optimize performance. Settings used to be pre-programmed by human engineers, but now are set by AI that dynamically adapts to driver inputs and race conditions. This isn’t treated as a rule violation.
YouTube channel DailyFuelUp claims the AIs have become so good at engine mapping that drivers can’t afford to deviate from the exact driving styles their AIs push them into. This is leading to risk-averse races that are boring to watch and “determined by whose computer behaves and whose doesn’t.”
They are indeed sometimes misbehaving: One driver describes how he overtook another only because the car had given him too much power in that moment, and he couldn’t afford to throw it away. Other glitches are blamed for at least one crash.
But okay, Formula 1 has always been an intentional fusion of human and high-tech. Surely humans would remain in control of traditional sports like, oh, let’s say baseball?
Uh oh. We had bigger things to cover at the time, but over the past few weeks I saw a few articles cross my desk about Major League Baseball closing a loophole that had allowed teams to receive AI recommendations on pitches and substitutions via their authorized dugout iPads. Ever since the “Moneyball” era, the sport has keenly recognized the power of predictive statistics, and the folly of deviating from mathematically optimal strategy. Teams this season were increasingly calling suggested pitches from the dugouts, and some, like the Miami Marlins and New York Mets, were believed to have invested heavily in their AI tools.
Okay, fine, cheaters gonna cheat. How about low-stakes activities where everyone is just there to have fun? You know, like writing fan fiction?
Um, yeah, about that: The New York Times reported last week on revelations that at least one popular fan fiction community was riddled with AI-generated content. The bombshell arrived via an anonymous forum poster who showed that 38 popular fan stories inspired by the male-male hockey romance Heated Rivalry (a novel and HBO series) were likely written by Anthropic’s Claude.
The community quickly turned on itself in a frenzy of accusations and counter-accusations. “It was definitely a witch hunt,” said one fan.
I think it’s safe to assume that AI’s use in this space isn’t limited to gay hockey fiction. While writing communities might be especially offended by AI use, they are not immune to its temptations. There are many reasons someone might want to create fan fiction that don’t involve wanting to write fan fiction: because they want more of the story; because they want to explore what-ifs; because they want to receive praise from an online forum. Just because it’s not a sport doesn’t mean there aren’t winners and losers.
Sports and arts are among the purest expressions of our human nature, but so is the impulse to bring AI into them.
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.