Not between a player and a coach, but between an analyst and a coach. The analyst is more mathlete than athlete, but his influence on the Chicago Fire’s wins and losses is massive.

“It’s been pretty cool, especially growing up a Chicago Fire fan,” said the analyst. “Being able to now work with the club, help the club make better decisions, has been really validating.”

Kevin Minkus is his name, and analytics are his game.

The Glen Ellyn native is the Fire’s director of analytics, and he uses advanced technology – including forms of artificial intelligence – to gain an edge in performance, scouting and recruitment.

How does his help make a difference on the pitch?

“We’ve scored goals specifically exploiting work that our Machine Learning Modeling has told us are areas we can attack,” Minkus said.

Wearable GPS devices help Minkus and the Fire collect enormous amounts of valuable data during training and matches. The devices are distributed by a company called HUDL that works with elite teams across the globe.

John Wirtz is one of three people who helped found the company.

“You can really understand a player’s load live during practice and live during the game, and you can optimize every single training and practice session to make sure you’re hitting that optimal level of load that matches game pace but doesn’t overshoot and start getting into that soft tissue injury territory,” said the company’s chief product officer.

At Northwestern University, five athletic programs use similar wearable devices, including the Wildcats women’s soccer team. Lindsey Parkins – an assistant director of Olympic sports performance– uses the devices to help prepare players for a grueling season.

“We want fast, strong, resilient, fit athletes, and how do we make sure that we get them to that point so when they’re in the season, they’re ready to go?” Parkins said.

NU women’s soccer Head Coach Michael Moynihan believes showing players data generated by the wearable devices helps them push themselves to be their best.

“We could tell them somewhat subjectively, ‘It doesn’t look like you’re running enough – you’ve got to cover more ground’. And they’re like, ‘Oh man, I’m working, I’m really working, I feel like I’m covering a lot of ground.’ Well, we can pull out the data and be like, ‘Look – the player on the other team covered this much. You only covered this much. There’s room to make up’. And they’re like, ‘Whoa, okay.’ The light goes on, and they start changing the way they train so they can meet those physical demands,” Moynihan explained.

Move to one of the school’s weight rooms, and you can find players on the men’s basketball team using a different piece of technology: a force plate, which measures things like jump height, speed and force. It can also tell Brendon Ziegler, who’s another one of the school’s assistant directors of Olympic sports performance, if an athlete is favoring one side of his body.

“It really does give us some insight as to what’s going on,” Ziegler said. “It allows us to put some data to these subjective measures we’ve had in the past – not just asking how an athlete feels, we have some data to really back that up.”

Ziegler is able to show the data to men’s basketball head coach Chris Collins, and Collins can use it to determine how much he pushes his players in practice.

“Are your guys worn out? Do they have more to give?,” explained Collins. “What do the numbers bear, what does the science tell you? And it’s just amazing the amount of things we now have to quantity these areas and help our athletes be at their very best.”

Some teams and athletic departments are open to talking about the way they’re using AI and advanced technology, but others are not. NBC Chicago asked all of the top level pro and college teams in town to show us how they’re trying to gain an edge on the competition, but the majority of them turned us down.

Could it be because they’re hiding what they think is a secret advantage? It’s impossible to know for sure.

One thing we do know, at least at the pro level, is that analytics departments who collect and interpret data are common and often large. Of the Chicago pro teams that told us they have an analytics department, the Cubs is the biggest with more than 30 people, followed by the Blackhawks with 11. The Fire’s, led by Minkus, is made up of five people, while the Bears reported theirs has four. The White Sox and Bulls acknowledged they have an analytics department but declined to say specify the size, while the Sky and Red Stars told NBC Chicago that they don’t have a formal analytics department.

For the teams that did talk to us, they agree advanced technology in sports will only continue to grow and evolve.

“The one thing that I see as possibly an advent of AI in this space is being able to interpret the data that we have, and maybe see something that humans don’t,” Ziegler theorized.

Minkus expects teams to invest even more resources than they do now.

“We’ll see larger departments and maybe more data-driven processes on the whole as everyone is in the arms race to continue to find those edges over the rest of the competition,” said the fire’s director of analytics.

Collins can hardly imagine how things will change in the next decade.

“I’m almost scared to think what it’s going to look like in the next 10 years from what we have now,” Collins said.

But what happens if voice uniqueness can be captured by an Artificial Intelligence (AI) cloning software?

Voice cloning can now be created quickly and cheaply, and is not just limited to celebrities and politicians.

The technology, if used with nefarious intent, may also pose a risk to consumers.

“It makes it scarier, makes it harder to defend against,” said Chris Carlis, a consultant for the Lombard-based security firm Dolos Group.

AI voice cloning technology is making scams harder to detect.

“The scams where, you know, my grandson called me up, he’s on vacation. He says he needs bail money or whatever. Using AI voice cloning could now potentially sound exactly like the grandson’s voice,” Carlis noted.

Carlis said voice cloning has also hurt some businesses by convincing coworkers to wire money to scammers inadvertently.

Carlis showed a sample, using NBC Chicago reporter Patrick Fazio’s voice to clone the words: “In your inbox is an invoice. You need to process it right away.”

Carlis cloned the voice and added a muffled sound of airport noise in the background to create a sense of urgency.

He used a website that charged just $5.00 to create a fake voice mail, cloning Fazio’s voice with audio that he found online.

The ability of AI to trick people is not limited to voicemails and audio recordings.

“There is a possibility for real time voice cloning, and it’s getting better,” Carlis noted.

The Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have both issued warnings on what artificial intelligence technology is capable of.

“It can be very challenging to find the people perpetrating these crimes, because they generally are very technologically savvy,” said FBI Special Agent Siobhan Johnson.

Johnson said it can take longer to track down cyber criminals, including those who use artificial intelligence.

“The technology is really very new. And so it’s really just starting to trickle in. But there is concern that we’ll see a lot more of it in the coming years,” Johnson added.

The FBI’s internet crime report showed Americans lost over $10 billion dollars last year from internet scams that involved AI and/or voice cloning.

So what can you do to protect yourself—specifically from voice cloning?

“Go online. Look at your social media. Is it locked or private? Can anybody just go and watch your videos and steal your voice or your visual content?,” Johnson said.

“You should really trust your gut if something seems a little bit off,” added Carlis.

Security expert Chris Carlis had advice for people who think they might be getting a voice cloning call.

“Slow down. Run it past somebody else. Double check, “ said Carlis. “Give it some thought instead of losing a whole bunch of money.”

It’s not just voice cloning. Security experts believe AI video manipulation will advance to where scammers could impersonate someone else with a full AI face and voice swap making it so convincible that it would be even more difficult for people to detect.

If you feel you’ve been the victim of an internet crime, complaints can be filed at the FBI’s internet crime complaint Center (IC3) at this link.

Northwestern University graduate student Rom Brown welcomes the technology’s presence.

“I think it’s very beneficial,” Brown told NBC Chicago.

Others believe it gets rid of the cold start problem when writing a paper.

Matt Sullivan, an economics major, said that he doesn’t use the technology too frequently, adding that he enlists the help of AI around once a week.

Could it replace teachers?

Kris Hammond is a celebrated professor of computer science at Northwestern University who believes we’re moving in that direction.

He runs the Center for Advancing Safety of Machine Intelligence where they’ve learned that clean, clear and coherent writing is not always right.    

“It can write things that sound just like what we wrote, but one problem: it doesn’t know what’s true, just what’s most likely.”

A March survey published by bestcolleges.com of 1,000 college students nationwide found that 43% of college students use an Artificial Intelligence application like ChatGPT: a language model built for conversation.

Of those, half say they have used AI tools on assignments or exams.

Rom Brown adds that he thinks “it really enriches the way that we learn when it is used the right way.”

Professor Hammond says students across the country are using it all the time.

“I teach students who program. They’re ALL using it,” Hammond said.

Students told us they believe that if you ask the right questions, it can provide a nice baseline.

Hammond adds to that, explaining that students think with the technology, as opposed to having the AI think for them.

“A genuine partnership between human and machine. Where you write a little, it asks questions about what you’ve written, because it can do evaluation too,” Hammond said.

“We don’t want the machine to replace those baseline skills. And so it is the challenge: how do you teach writing to people who have a writer sitting next to them?”

Hammond, very seriously, said it would be a blessing to be replaced by AI in the classroom. 

“Because I’m replaced by something as good as I am, and a thousand times more effective…that means I would scale, and that would be magnificent to me. It’s not just that I’m being replaced but that I am being scaled across the world, I can think of nothing an educator would want more than that,” Hammond said.

Bestcolleges.com found that 61% of students polled think AI tools will be normalized for people of all ages.

Is using AI cheating?

The BestColleges survey says just over half of those polled believe it is.

Shagun Lahodi is a graduate student who argues against it being labeled as cheating.

“I don’t think it’s cheating. Just giving you another perspective. If you copy, it’s cheating.”

While many institutions are still debating whether AI should be allowed in the classroom or not, 63% of students in the BestColleges research agree that Al cannot replace human creativity or intelligence.