Some tennis players are not satisfied with the new judges of the Wimbledon AI line, as reported by the Telegraph.
This is the first year that the prestigious tennis tournament, which is still in progress, replaced human line judges, which determine if a ball is in or out, with an electronic line call system (ELC).
Many players have criticized AI technology, mainly to make incorrect calls, which led them to lose points. In particular, British tennis star Emma Raducanu called technology for missing a bullet that her opponent struck, but had to be played as if she were. During a television replay, the ball looked at, the Telegraph reported.
Jack Draper, the British N ° 1, also said that he thought that some online calls were bad, saying that he did not think that AI technology was “100% exact”.
Player Ben Shelton had to accelerate his match after being informed that the new AI line system was about to stop working because of sunlight. Elsewhere, the players said that they could not hear the new automated speaker system, with a deaf player saying that without the signals of the human hand of line judges, she could not say when she won a point or not.
The technology also encountered a key point in a match this weekend between the British player Sonay Kartal and the Russian Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, where a bullet died out, but the technology failed to make the call. The referee had to intervene to stop the rally and told the players to replay the point because the ELC failed to follow the point. Wimbledon apologized later, saying it was a “human error” and that technology was accidentally extinct during the match. It also adjusted technology so that, ideally, the error cannot be repeated.
Debbie Jevans, president of the All England Club, the organization that hosts Wimbledon, retaliated to Raducanu and Draper, saying: “When we had lines, we were constantly asked why we had no electronic call because it is more correct than the rest of the tour.”
We contacted Wimbledon to comment.
This is not the first time that AI technology has been criticized while tennis tournaments have continued to partially or entirely adopt automated systems. Alexander Zverev, a German player, called the same automated line judgment technology in April, displaying a photo on Instagram showing where a ball called was very out.
Critics reveal the friction in the completely replacement of humans by AI, which explains why a human-Ai balance is perhaps necessary because more and more organizations adopt such technology. Most recently, Klarna said it was trying to hire human workers after having already made an effort for automated jobs.
