The ethics of artificial intelligence in sport

Abstract What reason, if any, is there to object to the use of Artificial Intelligence in sport? While the existing literature has investigated several issues about the ethics of AI in sport, these studies have tended to focus on how general worries about AI such as transparency, privacy, bias, impacts on human rights and inequalities that may arise or be exacerbated by the use of AI in sport [13, 44, 58]. In this paper, we will take a different approach by asking how such technologies may change the excellences that a sport is testing and developing. After identifying failures in existent arguments for analogous cases of proscription, we offer a novel framework for understanding proscription. We argue that the introduction of a novel technology risks changing the cluster of excellences that a sport is testing and promoting. Focusing on the strategic and tactical thinking of the coach in football, we argued that the cluster of excellences in football would be contracted if this were outsourced to AI systems. We will argue that this shows the need for a widespread debate involving those involved in sport about whether to allow sports to be transformed in this way or not.