X Games will experiment with an AI judge for the first time this week in a new collaboration with Google

The X Games have always been about pushing boundaries, and this weekend in Aspen, it’s about to do so yet again—by showcasing a new way to judge competitions.

The X Games will debut an AI judge for the first time in Aspen during its upcoming event starting on January 23, showcasing new technology that should help improve objectivity in subjectively scored sporting events. It could also be something of a preview for the future of sports and contest judging.

The experimental AI judge was developed in collaboration with Google Cloud, and will be used during one event—the snowboarding SuperPipe competition—and the AI judge’s scores will not be factored into determining the winner.

At least not this time.

Jeremy Bloom, the freshly minted CEO of the X Games and an athlete who spent time in the NFL and was an Olympic skier, says the project is game-changing. A friend of Google cofounder Sergey Brin, he says the two workshopped the idea in December, and numerous Google AI engineers were tasked with putting it all together in time for the X Games’s 30th anniversary, which is this month.

It will be the first time that an AI judge is used in a major sporting event, he says.

“Brin asked if we could do something together,” Bloom tells Fast Company. “I grew up in judged sports, and sometimes humans get it wrong, and the cost to the athlete or a team can be really high. So I said, ‘What if we used technology to bring more objectivity to judged sports?'”

Brin loved the idea, Bloom adds.

That was six weeks ago. In the short amount of time that the model has existed, it’s been trained on thousands of hours of snowboarding content, the judging criteria used, and a human head judge has also helped calibrate it, according to Bloom. “Today it’s demonstrating a great ability to understand tricks,” he says.

How the AI judge will work at the X Games

As for what fans can expect? Bloom says the X Games will include a 90-minute feature on how the model was built, and then there will be a “prediction” phase in which the AI judge will watch snowboarders during practice runs, and then offer its predictions as to which participants will comprise the top three when all is said and done.

Then, during the final, “it’ll revisit the qualification run of three athletes, do the full color-commentating—so, name the tricks they’re doing—and then spit out a score,” he says.

Those scores won’t be used for deciding who wins a medal, but they will be showcased along with the human judges’ scores for comparison. “It’ll be a preview for the audience of what it’s capable of doing.”

While the AI judge, in this case, will be something of an experiment that can show off its abilities, it’s not crazy to think that we’ll see more of it in the future—in the X Games and in other sports competitions or leagues, too.

That’ll take some acclimation from fans and viewers, of course, but what if if it turns out that the AI judge is, objectively, fairer or more accurate than the human judges? There may be clamoring from all corners to implement the technology in other sports.

Bloom says he’s already having conversations about it, and that other commissioners and CEOs, along with himself, are “excited about the innovation.” And that what people will see this weekend will only be a preview as to what’s coming down the pike.

“In Aspen, we’re just going to be sharing the tip of the spear,” he says. “I’m blown away by what this can do.”