The use of generative artificial intelligence in sports is a hot-button topic. On Thursday morning, prominent tennis writer Ben Rothenberg noted an obvious AI-generated image (with significant errors) of Iga Swiatek and Alexandra Eala that had long been featured on the Women’s Tennis Association website.
Couldn’t stop thinking about the bizarre AI mangled images that have been atop the WTA website for the last 12 hours and counting, so I wrote about them here.
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— Ben Rothenberg (@BenRothenberg) April 24, 2025
As Rothenberg notes in detail in his “Bounces” Substack newsletter, the joint photo of Eala and Swiatek that topped the WTA site for 16-plus hours before it was changed after his callout managed to mangle their sponsor logos, fingers, and more.
Generative AI is an inescapable part of life in 2025, especially on the internet, and I don’t think most people are paying nearly enough attention to how insidious and low-quality so much of it is. So much AI is being used and accepted so quickly without understanding how it works, or how much it’s taking the humanity, texture, and competence out of our culture.
I could say a whole lot more about the existential threats of AI at play here—and how much outsourcing of creativity and basic thinking people are willingly doing in the name of profit or just laziness or cutting corners—but in short: when it comes to choosing between humans or machines, I am on the side of humanity, and I think you should be, too.
A remarkable element of this is that there was no need to work with AI. This was not a hypothetical situation where AI might provide value in imagining figures in an unusual environment or any of the other use cases for AI in sports. Swiatek and Eala are both well-established WTA figures, and numerous human-taken images of them on actual courts exist, which the WTA has the right to access.
Using a simple photo editing program (free or paid) would have enabled the WTA figure who posted this photo to create an image featuring both Eala and Swiatek. That also could have provided appropriate credits for the photographers. Instead, the WTA’s digital approach distorted the appearance of two of its stars and, perhaps even more significantly, altered their corporate sponsors’ logos into unrecognizable blurs.
Of course, there have been past cases of corporate sponsors being covered up due to league policies. However, there is no indication that this was at play here, especially since the sanctioning body permitted these outfits for on-court play and broadcasts thereof.
This does not appear to be an attempt to circumvent corporate sponsorship policies but rather an effort to avoid the minimal work required to create a side-by-side graphic with two separate photos. That decision led to negative press for the WTA.
