More Canadian athletes powered by artificial intelligence at Winter Games

Source Domain: ca.news.yahoo.com

Just for fun, Xavier McKeever and his cross-country ski teammates once tasked ChatGPT to design a training plan for them.

“It was the craziest training plan we’ve ever seen,” said the 22-year-old from Canmore, Alta.

“It basically said you should do intensity every single day. You should do three hours of skiing and then an hour of intensity, and repeat that a few times — and then you should take a week off completely. We know you can’t do that.

“It was pretty funny to see and do, to see Chat GPT can’t write a training plan, and that we need our coaching to help us with that.”

While OpenAI’s chatbot didn’t nail a workout for the skiers, artificial intelligence has entered the lives of Canada’s athletes at the Winter Games in Milan-Cortina, Italy.

The Oxford Dictionary defines AI as “the capacity of computers or other machines to exhibit or simulate intelligent behaviour” and “software used to perform tasks or produce output previously thought to require human intelligence, esp. by using machine learning to extrapolate from large collections of data.”

“The word ‘artificial intelligence’ or ‘AI’ is so misunderstood,” said Andy Van Neutegem, vice-president of performance sciences, research and innovation at Own the Podium, Canada’s high-performance sport funding and advisory body.

“We tend to use the word ‘machine learning.'”

From Apple and Garmin watches and Oura rings that feed sleep and heart-rate data into smartphones to generate recovery scores, to inertial measurement units attached to athletes’ bodies for three-dimensional positioning analysis, the AI boom is inescapable.

A common theme among Canadian athletes is that AI is more of a tool for training than competition. They value instinct and lived experience just as much as, if not more than, data.

“In my sport that’s performance on demand, it’s important to have some data, but have a very good feel for the snow,” said freestyle skier and triple Olympic moguls medallist Mikael Kingsbury.

“In a sport where things…

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