This weekend’s 60th Annual Grammy Awards will feature big names like Beyoncé, Rihanna, and Watson. The latter is IBM’s famous artificial intelligence platform, which the Grammys are enlisting to curate the videos and photos being released to music fans following along with this year’s awards show on social media in real time.
IBM is partnering with Grammys organizer the Recording Academy to provide Watson’s AI services to populate the event’s social media feeds with automatically-generated content during the Grammy Awards ceremony, which airs this Sunday, Jan. 28, on CBS.
IBM’s Watson will get to work before the ceremony even starts, analyzing and sorting “hours of video and close to 125,000 photographs” taken during the Grammys’ hours-long red carpet show ahead of Sunday’s event, IBM said in its announcement. The platform will use features such as facial recognition, even analyzing stars’ “facial emotion,” to pick out the best images and videos to post for fans online.
IBM added that Watson will even sift through decades of songs, analyzing the “emotional tone of Grammy-nominated song lyrics,” as part of its AI-generated output of social media content. Considering the large number of recording artists who will be in attendance at the Grammys, and the many thousands of photos and videos that will be taken during the event, the Recording Academy will be able to rely on the Watson artificial intelligence platform to sort through reams of content and “create unique fan experiences” with the type of speed and efficiency that would be impossible for humans to do manually.
Start spreading the news…the 60th annual #GRAMMYs is coming back to New York City on January 28th and @IBM is proud to announce our partnership as the Official AI Partner of the GRAMMY Awards pic.twitter.com/R8wUbGlJ75
— IBM Sports & Entertainment (@IBMSports) January 19, 2018
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IBM previously put Watson to work picking video highlights from last fall’s U.S. Open tennis grand slam tournament in New York. Noah Syken, IBM’s vice president of sports and entertainment partnerships, said in a statement that IBM’s Watson AI platform can be put to use in a variety of industries. “It is the same technology we use to help corporate marketing departments understand which content works and why,” he said. “And the visual recognition and photo tagging is the same technology we use to help radiologists spot cancer.”
The 60th Annual Grammy Awards begin this Sunday at 7:30 p.m. ET at Madison Square Garden in New York City.