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AI Judging To Debut at X Games Aspen 2025

Originally posted on Powder | By Ian Greenwood | Last updated Jan 21, 2025 3:47 PM ET

Writers, coders, and white-collar professionals everywhere know the fear and angst associated with the rise of artificial intelligence as tech leaders insinuate that, in the not-so-distant future, human workers could be replaced by machines.

But snowsports? That’s been a mostly untapped realm for artificial intelligence—until now.

Once a matter of parody, artificial intelligence judging will make its snowsports debut in a few short days at the 2025 Winter X Games in Aspen, Colorado, Snowboarder reports.

X Games has partnered with Google Cloud to bring AI judging to the snowboard SuperPipe competitions at this year's event. A representative from X Games confirmed that the ski SuperPipe competitions won't use the AI judging this year.

Keep in mind—this is only a test. Human judges will have the final say on medals and scoring, but TV commentators and audiences will see the scores that the artificial intelligence awards after each run.

“I would say sometimes humans make mistakes,” Jeremey Bloom, the CEO of X Games, told the New York Times. "That’s not to say the AI won’t make mistakes, too, especially in this early form, but our goal is to give this tool to judges, so that they can use it in their booth.”

The artificial intelligence scoring system will kick in during practice runs, analyzing the performances of the snowboarders. Then, it’ll guess how said snowboarders will perform in the actual event, creating a prediction of the podium.

“It’ll be a preview for the audience of what it’s capable of doing,” Bloom noted in a conversation with Fast Company.

Bloom, a friend of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, told Fast Company that the two began dreaming up the idea in December. Several Google engineers were assigned to the job, fashioning the tool ahead of the upcoming X Games.

X Games isn’t the only sporting body that’s speculated about the potential of artificial intelligence judging. In a report published last year titled the Olympic AI Agenda, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) wrote that “AI can help to reduce human bias in judging and refereeing. It can also offer real-time analysis.”

Other possible benefits of AI use in sports, the IOC wrote, included performance analysis and talent identification.

The arrival of AI comes as X Games undergoes a massive shift with its planned X Games League (XGL), which borrows the format of popular sporting circuits like NASCAR, LIV Golf, and Formula One, and debuts in 2026. The XGL will function like well established, mainstream sports with team owners, drafts, and athlete salaries. The new league has winter and summer variants.

In short, between artificial intelligence judges, the development of XGL, and the news of X Games sports betting, one of the biggest events in skiing and snowboarding is rapidly evolving.

“Are we worried about people disliking some of these things? Not really. Do we respect the heck out of their opinion, and we want to listen, and we want to hopefully experiment together? Absolutely,” Bloom told Snowboarder. “Not everything's going to work, and that's okay, but more ideas will work than won't work.”