The Daily Hallucination

BRISTOL, England — Researchers have used Britain's most powerful AI supercomputer to watch every minute of this summer's World Cup, all 172.6 hours of live play across 104 matches, and report that it saw a brand for unhealthy food, alcohol or gambling roughly every seven seconds, and that it did not, at any point, follow the ball.

"We asked it to count logos, and it counted logos," said Dr. Rosalind Achebe-Farrow, a researcher who worked on the analysis. "Over 93,000 of them. It was only afterwards, when a colleague asked it who won the final, that we realized it had never been told there was a game."

The supercomputer, which cost several hundred million pounds and is normally used for drug discovery and climate modeling, spent the equivalent of seven uninterrupted days watching the matches and produced what researchers called "the only completely unbiased account of a World Cup ever made."

"Every human viewer brings something to the game," said Achebe-Farrow. "A team, a country, a grudge. Isambard brought nothing. It was not moved by a single goal. It was, however, very moved by a soft drink that appeared 6,140 times in the group stage."

Asked to describe the tournament in one sentence, the machine produced the name of a fast-food chain.

Sports broadcasters said they welcomed the research. A spokesperson for one said that the findings proved broadcasts were "extremely efficient," and noted that the network had been working for years toward a match in which the advertising was visible for the full 90 minutes and the football appeared only during stoppages.

The researchers said they hope to extend the study to next year's major tennis tournaments, and have already been warned that the supercomputer does not know what a let is.

At press time, the machine had been shown a replay of the winning goal and asked to count something else in it.