Adam Silver's NBA All-Star Weekend Tech Announcements Are an Annual Embarrassment

Another NBA All-Star Weekend has mercifully come to a close following another disappointing All-Star game. The league will now return to the drawing board and try to dream up ways to make players care about the event and somehow manufacture a good game next year for the sake of sports talk radio discussions and better ratings.

Not that a good basketball game is the only thing they'll be working on over the next year. They must continue to find ways to stuff their product into cutting edge technologies so that Adam Silver will have something to awkwardly unveil to a theater full of people in San Francisco next year. This year, it was "NB-AI." Take a look.

Looks horrible doesn't it, folks? The person quote tweeting that video is Christopher Miller, one of the writers and producers of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, which is what that NB-AI-generated video ripped off. Miller called the NBA video "janky ass" and noted that they were not consulted about the video, which is exactly how AI works so it really was a great demonstration on multiple levels.

The good news is that no one will ever use this technology because why do you want to see a cartoon-ish version of a basketball highlight? And why would anyone ever try to do this in real-time? It's like going to see one of those breathtaking animated Spider-Verse films in the theater while wearing a VR headset so that it would be immediately turned into some shitty AI version full of humans from the uncanny valley.

Silver has to pretend to be excited about something like this ever year now. Last year he brought Ahmad Rashad out on stage in Utah and (very awkwardly!) scanned his body with a smartphone and had him digitally added to a clip from a Lakers - Jazz game. In the year since this technology was debuted have you seen a single example of it?

How about the year before when the NBA dove into the Metaverse and Silver announced something called "Coach NAT" (NBA Augmented Telepresence) which was supposed to revolutionize player development with a virtual coach. Note that this was straight out of the Elon Musk playbook. This is just a computer generated image voiced by Shaq - complete with tired jokes about free throws and Superman.

Can you imagine pitchingt his stuff to Adam Silver? He must be more disgusted by this behind closed doors than he is by the actual product on the court at the All-Star game when he's in front of the cameras.

It's great that the NBA is thinking about enhancing the fan experience, but this stuff is nothing more than a distraction from the league's actual issues. Figure out how to make the All-Star game decent. Figure out load management. Figure out the ends of games and the referees. You know, stuff that will actually make people watch the games. Unless the NBA is going to debut AI-generated fans and ratings next year.