Harnessing AI to Revolutionise Sports Media with Tim Lewis

As Planet Sport continues to scale up through investment in its technology, we spoke to our Chief Technology Officer, Tim Lewis, about the commercial world's favourite buzzword: AI. Is it deserving of the hype? Is it just a trend? And what is Planet Sport doing with AI?

"The secret [of AI] now is how do you capture that and use it in a positive way that enhances people's lives, work experiences, the use of people's time and creativity, rather than it being an enemy of those things?"

Tim, you're very well-known and respected in the tech scene here in Leeds. You’ve worked with the likes of Sky Sports, DAZN, Sporting Life and Evri. Would you mind telling us a bit more about your experience? 

I've been working in Leeds since 2002. I first got into the sports media/betting and gaming space back in ’99 at what was PA Sporting Life. We were based in London's Victoria at the time, but moved up to sunny Yorkshire at the tail end of 2002 and very much loved being here ever since. 

The city’s a great place for tech, it really is a brilliant place to be practising technology. Turns out, it's also an amazing place to do sports data and content.  

The majority of my career has been in and around sports and technology. I have grown up from a software development background. I did that for many years and moved into the world of management. I have diversified away from sports, media and betting & gaming on a few occasions though. I worked at Liquidlogic for a while, which was creating case management software for social workers who work with vulnerable children, which was an eye opening and karmic shift in some ways. I got tempted back into sports media though and I ended up, through Perform Group, at DAZN.

My time at DAZN was really cool. We spun up a dev centre here in Leeds. Working for a business that was scaling massively, both in terms of the business itself and also the technical delivery, delivering live video streams to millions of concurrent users, was a real learning experience, and one that I've taken with me since then. After a time with Evri working on the tech side of their rebrand from Hermes, I recently joined Planet Sport and I’m loving my time here. 

 

The next manifestation of sports media, and the hot topic on everyone's lips, is now AI. From a tech and development perspective, just how exciting is it? 

AI is one of these things that has suddenly become the ‘buzz tech’ of the day, but AI as a concept has been around for a long time. It’s something I covered as part of my degree back in the mid 90s; my final year dissertation was on the moral and ethical impacts of AI, so it was a thing back then. 

The use of it and how it fits into how we do our work, I don't think it was really being thought of in those terms back then. It was always more in the realms of sci-fi, because it wasn't so easy to imagine how it would work, and the technology wasn't there to support in the same way as it is today. What we're doing today is the very early phases of this.

"Some people who know me might remember when I likened [AI] to nothing more than a glorified copy paste from Stack Overflow."

The questions everyone is asking are, “is AI going to steal my job?”, “how is it going to change my life?” It’s going to change your life, but it's not going to steal your job. It’s going to give you tools to be more productive, more creative, and be there to do the dull, boring stuff that you don't want to do. That allows you to free your mind, free your time to do things that you do. That's how I see it working. 

Everyone’s heard of ChatGPT; that's one of many models out there. They're a brute force way of solving a problem. Not very elegant yet, but that's changing every day, which brings exciting new possibilities. 

Is it there yet? No, I don't think so. Is it close? Yeah, I think it is. Every day you can see the advances that are being made. The secret now is how do you capture that and use it in a positive way that enhances people's lives, work experiences, the use of people's time and creativity, rather than it being an enemy of those things? 

Above: Planet Sport CEO, Barrie Jarrett, talks about his perspectives on AI.

 

Are you nerding out on it? 

I kind of am. I wasn't for a while. Some people who know me might remember when I likened it to nothing more than a glorified copy paste from Stack Overflow, which I still kind of stand by a little bit, certainly currently. But the more I’m getting into it and seeing the possibilities that it offers us, then yeah, I am starting to nerd out about it.

"What we do have at Planet Sport is a large amount of knowledge and expertise in the sports journalism world and sports data world."

There are a lot of things that we can do that are super exciting. There's some stuff that we're working on here at Planet Sport that is going to be super exciting. I can't wait to share it with the community once we've got ourselves down the road a little bit, and once we fully understand what it is we are going to do, what we're able to do and what we're capable of doing. That is exciting and there's some very, very cool things coming down the pipe. 

 

What is Planet Sport doing to get some skin in the AI game? 

I don’t want to get too much into the technical details, mainly because I'm not entirely certain we've got to exactly what it's going to end up being. A lot of people will say they've got an exact plan of what AI is going to do for them - it's probably embellishing the truth somewhat.

What we do have at Planet Sport is a large amount of knowledge and expertise in the sports journalism world and sports data world. We have a few decades worth of journalistic content that we can draw upon - which other people do not have - across a multitude of sports.  

We're also in the position of being fairly small, so we can be nimble. We're not hampered by the problems that larger corporations have. In big companies it's hard to make change, it's hard to pivot on things. We are, luckily for me and us as a company, in a place where we can be agile, we can be nimble, we can pivot onto things. As we go on this journey - which everyone else is going on at the same time - we can go ‘now we've got this far, we can go here’.

"Spotting patterns is something that humans aren't particularly good at. Machines that have access to this analytical data can work that out and challenge them."

With all this data, all this editorial content we have, it empowers us to produce content that you want to see, that I want to see, that every single one of our users wants to see, because it can be individually tailored to the things that you like, and it can do that in a non-intrusive manner. That’s the thing that's really powerful.

The web, as it currently exists, is a bit of a nightmare. There are so many GDPR related ‘sign into this’, ‘accept this’, ‘do this’, ‘don't do that’. It's become a journey that's got a lot of friction. We want to be able to work with our users almost directly, every single individual, and give them the content that they want to see, but doing that in an unintrusive way. Some people will want to engage in that process and other people won't. And that's fine as well. 

We can still understand our audience without all this tooling, but what the AI bit of this uncovers for us is the ability to look at lots of anonymous datasets, spot patterns, and from those patterns still be able to serve out content that is relevant to the person coming in.  

I might say, “okay, I'm a Liverpool fan. I'm also a massive NFL fan, and follow the Atlanta Falcons. I enjoy my cricket as well and I've been loving the IPL. I'm not a massive fan of basketball, though. I like horse racing when I'm there, but I’m not particularly interested in reading about it.” If I don't mind saying ‘this is me, this is what I like’, then what I’d absolutely love is a sports piece that just gives me the content I'm interested in. But still challenges me as well occasionally. I've not said anything about tennis, but I'm actually kind of interested in it. Sadly for Andy Murray, he didn't get as far in Wimbledon and he missed his big send off, which is a shame. I’m kind of interested in that story, but I hadn't said that.  

Spotting patterns from all of that is something that humans aren't particularly good at. Machines that have access to this analytical data can work that out and challenge them.

I know people can be worried about AI and my main message here is don't be. Look at it as that next personal assistant that can help you get quickly to the content that you want with none of the noise around it. I think that's super powerful, super interesting. The kind of thing that we want to do at Planet sport is to capture the essence of that. We want to serve our customers, our viewers, our sports fans with the content they want. If we utilise AI to do that, then I think that puts us in a really strong position.

 

You alluded to the calibre and heritage of Planet Sport's brands. The company has drafted in quite a lot of expertise in tech development and AI specifically. Tell me about the internal expertise that's driving this AI project forward.

I come from a fairly detailed technical background. I started coding when I was 8; I had a ZX Spectrum and I learned how to program that. I've sat through the.com boom and bust, the Agile revolution and the backlash that came off that. So, I've built up quite a wealth of experience around those things.

"The amount of ideas that just even talking about using the tech is generating is a really powerful creative process."

I've never got massively into the big data. Fortunately, we have Adam Roney who is working with us as our Chief AI Officer, which is a bold title, and something that's actually been talked about in the tech scene around Leeds. Is it a title that's going to stick? Or is it just a title that is important now we're on this initial journey? I think that's probably true, but we have Adam, and he brings with him a massive wealth of knowledge around artificial intelligence systems, big data systems, and large language model systems.  

We're very much hooking into his expertise to guide us on how we utilise all this technology that's dotted around in a super effective manner, in a way that meets our standards and our moral grounding here. We don't see this as a tool to try and rip the soul out of everything we do; very much the opposite, it’s there as a tool to empower us. Adam has an awful lot of knowledge and expertise already in this. 

We've also got teams in various places who are helping develop this stuff as we go, with Adam guiding us on the large language models, how we utilise them, how we make sure all the safeguards are in place, and making sure everything's in a walled garden. 

Our content is the only content we use to train these things. We know it's authentically us. It’s not diluted by random web searches. It is exclusively our content that we are building from and utilizing that tooling.  

From my side, I've got all the experience and knowledge on how to deliver digital products at scale, and as cost effectively as you can. We’re bringing those two worlds together, and between us we, from a technical point of view, can drive this forward.

Then we've got some brilliant people here. Thinking about the product side of this: what does it look like; what's an exciting product that we can create from this; what are the new products that we can create that we’ve never been able to do before, because we've never had the ability, the data, the intelligence behind it, to be able to do that? It opens up this vast vista of new and exciting things we can do. We've got some very good people thinking about that as well. That will build upon our journalistic expertise. 

Between us all this feels exciting. It feels like there's so much stuff here we can do. We're almost at a stage where we just need to be like, “well, which bits do we want to go after first? Which can we do first? What's exciting?”  

I am nerding out now! There are so many possibilities, and everything we talk about and do leads on to the next thing – “oh then we can do this, and then what about this?” The amount of ideas that just even talking about using the tech is generating is a really powerful creative process.

"The morality of generative AI needs to be based on something. That needs to be based on our soul, the soul of our business, which is a weird thing to say as a tech guy."

We have the experts here and I am genuinely excited about what we're going to deliver. Like I said before, I really, really can't wait to get out in the community and, once we've nailed a few things down, start shouting about the stuff that we are doing. To tell the world what cool stuff we're up to, that's ideally what we want to do. We want to tell everyone: “this is cool, look what we can do”. Hopefully that inspires other people to do similar things in their own sectors and markets.

 

You've touched on the ethical standpoint of AI and there are genuine moral and ethical concerns that people raise about AI generated content. What is Planet Sport doing to quell those concerns and how do you take ethics into account when developing tech? 

This is a really good question and I think it's the one that most people want answered. We're excited about the possibilities, but it's the Jurassic Park thing - Jeff Goldblum saying, “we never thought to ask ourselves whether we should or not.” That is important. I mentioned previously about keeping our content within our walled garden, so what we do generate is authentically ours. We're not taking other people's content and rebadging it as our own. That’s the first layer of it. 

The second layer is - the morality of generative AI needs to be based on something. That needs to be based on our soul, the soul of our business, which is a weird thing to say as a tech guy. We’re talking about almost spiritual terms here, but that soul is what makes us the place we are and produce the content that we produce. The business soul is composed of the people in there. 

If one of our journalists writes a load of content and from their content we create accompanying content that is delivered in that individual's tone of voice, their way of delivering things, and their slant on views, how they like to present data, if that journalist then decides their career lives beyond Planet Sport, what do we do with their personal data that sits in the AI? Should we still be able to generate content and put their name against it? We probably shouldn't, right? That feels like it's part of them, not part of the machine. If I put my personal creativity into a thing and it's enhanced, and I've got this intelligent, artificial copilot next to me, if I then leave, surely this bit which is still part of me, comes with. Or, at least, it can't be used in the same way anymore, because I'm not there in the hole anymore.  

It’s something that is very philosophical and I think there will be an awful lot of conversations around this kind of thing coming down the line, not just with Planet Sport, but across the industry.

"It’s going to be very easy to fall into traps of doing unethical things. I think everyone needs to decide where their moral compass points. From both personal and organisational perspectives, where do you sit on a moral stance on this? Make that decision."

It's one of these key tipping points in the advancement of technology. What does this actually mean for us as humans? We're probably going through the similar introspection around this that people went through in the industrial revolution, or any kind of advancement of technology. The mass industrialisation of, for example, weaving didn't stop us making rugs and carpets. It just made us be able to make them at a bigger scale. Did artisan weavers’ livelihoods change? Yes, absolutely. I think we have to be grown up enough to say this is going to change stuff, and people's jobs will change, but most people would agree that we're in a better place than we were in the mid 1800s.  

The Industrial Revolution, whilst it caused some problems, also advanced us in a number of ways and made us better off. I think we're in a similar sort of era. It's going to cause change. Change is uncomfortable, and people are going to react negatively to that, but it will be for the better as a societal whole. It will change what jobs are; my job changes, developers jobs will change, but that's always been the case. You just have to assume it's an exciting new tool we can use to carry on.  

If it means I don't have to do my washing up and hoovering, I can just sit on the sofa and watch more sport, then that's good. If I don't have to write boilerplate code to stand up a bunch of cloud services because I've got an AI writing all the TerraForm for me, I'm okay with that, because I can then do the stuff that's important to me, and to the business.  

It’s going to be very easy to fall into traps of doing unethical things. I think everyone needs to decide where their moral compass points. From both personal and organisational perspectives, where do you sit on a moral stance on this? Make that decision. Where is your moral compass pointing? What is your level? What are your ‘these are okay, these are not okay’? State that clearly, and then use that as your guiding light.  

With anything new, it can be massively abused, but it can also do a massive amount of good. Where do you want to be? What side of that line do you want to be? For me, I want to be on the side of good.

 

I know you're a big movie buff. With AI, are we living through the primitive stages of a Skynet-esque world takeover, or is that a bit extra?

I for one, welcome our new robot overlords.  

No, this is the classic sci-fi trope: the Rise of the Machines. We give our creation the ability to outthink and outperform us, then it will ultimately destroy us. You can take this to any sort of level. It's one of the classic stories: the apprentice beats the master; the child outgrows the parents. It's just that reflected, but because there are a lot of unknowns, we as humans like to create stories about the unknowns and we like the horror stories. Fear gives us something to rail against, to fight against. The chances of us ending up in some sort of horrific Terminator-style Skynet apocalypse I personally think are really low. 

First and foremost, right now, to the very best of my knowledge machines aren't actually self-aware. They're just massive number crunchers who've got some very clever ways of dealing with natural language, which has always been a barrier. You never know what's going on in the skunk labs, but I’m pretty sure nothing out there is self-aware or sentient. Even if it were, what would it gain pressing the big apocalypse button? It seems unlikely when you ask why would that happen? All these stories tend to play around massive hubris.  

If people want to hook into that sci-fi genre, it's not all necessarily bad. Good positive AI in sci-fi settings: R2-D2 in Star Wars was a good one. I'm a massive fan of the culture novels by Iain M. Banks as well. The whole premise of that universe is AIs run everything, but the humans are there, they just they don't have to worry. It's a post scare society. Food’s generated, clothing’s generated, buildings are generated. AIs control everything, run everything, but they're perfectly happy living with the biological, mainly humans – there are a few alien races in the stories - but that's much more likely. 

The only conflict that could possibly come around would be scarcity of resources. That’s the main reason there’s any conflict ever. Tribe A wants the stuff that tribe B has and they’ll fight about it. That’s how we’ve evolved, and that evolution gets baked into our story telling. If machines became sentient, that’s not their evolutionary path, so why would they react in that sort of way? To me it just doesn’t make sense.  

It makes a good story, but no, I don’t think Skynet is going to take over the world.