{"id":179265,"date":"2025-07-07T18:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-07-07T18:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/2025\/07\/07\/tennis-players-criticize-ai-technology-used-by-wimbledon-techcrunch\/"},"modified":"2025-07-07T18:00:00","modified_gmt":"2025-07-07T18:00:00","slug":"tennis-players-criticize-ai-technology-used-by-wimbledon-techcrunch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/2025\/07\/07\/tennis-players-criticize-ai-technology-used-by-wimbledon-techcrunch\/","title":{"rendered":"Tennis players criticize AI technology used by Wimbledon | TechCrunch"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<p id=\"speakable-summary\" class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Some tennis players are not happy with Wimbledon\u2019s new AI line judges, as <a href=\"https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/tennis\/2025\/07\/06\/wimbledon-ai-makes-huge-mistake-in-sonay-kartal-match\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">reported by The Telegraph<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This is the first year the prestigious tennis tournament, which is still ongoing, replaced human line judges, who determine if a ball is in or out, with an electronic line calling system (ELC). <\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Numerous players criticized the AI technology, mostly for making incorrect calls, leading to them losing points. Notably, British tennis star Emma Raducanu called out the technology for missing a ball that her opponent hit out, but instead had to be played as if it were in. On a television replay, the ball indeed looked out, <a href=\"https:\/\/sports.yahoo.com\/article\/tearful-emma-raducanu-hits-ai-230729160.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Telegraph reported<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Jack Draper, the British No. 1, also said he felt some line calls were wrong, saying he did not think the AI technology was \u201c100 percent accurate.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Player Ben Shelton had to speed up his match after being told that the new AI line system was about to stop working because of the dimming sunlight. Elsewhere, <a href=\"https:\/\/sports.yahoo.com\/article\/wimbledon-slaps-down-raducanu-draper-200601367.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">players said<\/a> they couldn\u2019t hear the new automated speaker system, with one deaf player saying that without the human hand signals from the line judges, she was unable to tell when she won a point or not.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The technology also met a blip at a key point during a match this weekend between British player Sonay Kartal and the Russian Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, where a ball went out, but the technology failed to make the call. The umpire had to step in to stop the rally and told the players to replay the point because the ELC failed to track it. Wimbledon later apologized, saying it was a \u201chuman error\u201d and that the technology was accidentally shut off during the match.\u00a0It also <a href=\"https:\/\/sports.yahoo.com\/article\/wimbledon-overhauls-hawk-eye-avoid-144800132.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">adjusted the technology<\/a> so that, ideally, the mistake could not be repeated.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Debbie Jevans, chair of the All England Club, the organization that hosts Wimbledon, hit back at Raducanu and Draper, saying, \u201cWhen we did have linesmen, we were constantly asked why we didn\u2019t have electronic line calling because it\u2019s more accurate than the rest of the tour.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We\u2019ve reached out to Wimbledon for comment. <\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This is not the first time the AI technology has come under fire as tennis tournaments continue to either partially or fully adopt automated systems. Alexander Zverev, a German player, called out the same automated line judging technology back in April, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theverge.com\/news\/657300\/tennis-star-alexander-zverev-hawk-eye-els-line-judging\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">posting a picture to Instagram<\/a> showing where a ball called in was very much out.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The critiques reveal the friction in completely replacing humans with AI, making the case for why <a href=\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2025\/06\/06\/humans-provide-neccessary-checks-and-balance-for-ai-says-lattice-ceo\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">a human-AI balance<\/a> is perhaps necessary as more organizations adopt such technology. Just recently, the company <a href=\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2025\/06\/04\/klarna-ceo-says-company-will-use-humans-to-offer-vip-customer-service\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Klarna said it was looking<\/a> to hire human workers after previously making a push for automated jobs.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2025\/07\/07\/tennis-players-criticize-ai-technology-used-by-wimbledon\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some tennis players are not happy with Wimbledon\u2019s new AI line judges, as reported by The Telegraph.\u00a0 This is the first year the prestigious tennis tournament, which is still ongoing, replaced human line judges, who determine if a ball is in or out, with an electronic line calling system (ELC). Numerous players criticized the AI [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":179266,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-179265","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tech"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179265"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179265\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/179266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}