Did you hear that tennis star Rafael Nadal came out as gay?
It was news to me and I cover this stuff for a living, but some BBC News users late last month got an alert saying that Nadal had indeed declared he was gay.
The problem is that Nadal did NOT come out. It was the figment of the imagination of the oxymoronic “Apple Intelligence” feature on iPhones that generated an alert to the BBC News app.
“This false notification seemingly misinterpreted an article about Brazilian tennis player Joao Lucas Reis da Silva, who is gay,” Euronews reported.
Reis da Silva became the only current active out gay tennis player to come out as gay, when on Dec. 7 he shared an Instagram post celebrating the birthday of his boyfriend, actor and model Gui Sampaio Ricardo. The AI program somehow thought “Nadal” and “Reis da Silva” were the same person.
There are other possible reasons why AI got the idea that Nadal is gay. There was a 2017 play that had the tennis legend married to a man. And the time Nadal played strip tennis against male models. And maybe it was Outsports once wondering if Nadal’s glute muscles were just too big.
Whatever the reason, AI got it wrong. Again.
This was not the only recent hallucination the Apple Intelligence feature had regarding sports.
An “AI-generated alert about Luke Littler incorrectly declared him the [world darts] champion before the final match against Michael van Gerwen had even taken place,” Euronews said. “This misleading summary was based on a BBC article covering Littler’s semifinal victory. The false notification was sent to BBC News app users, caused widespread confusion as the final was yet to start.”
The BBC was pissed, in its understated way, saying in a statement: “It is essential that Apple fixes this problem urgently — as this has happened multiple times. As the most trusted news media organization in the world, it is crucial that audiences can trust any information or journalism published in our name and that includes notifications.”
As more and more news organizations use AI to generate alerts or news summaries, this problem will almost certainly continue.
I wonder how many more well-known athletes will falsely be reported as coming out as gay. It’s easy to see it happening, given how wrong AI can often be. It’s interesting that the BBC said errors have happened “multiple times,” which begs the question of why the service is even being used in the first place.
After regularly getting wrong answers to simple queries that now populate the top of most Google searches via its AI bot, I have learned to be skeptical about anything it says. Instead, I seek out legitimate news sources. That includes Outsports, which would have been all over any news that someone like Nadal had come out.
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