The Grok AI summary of X/Twitter discussions has regularly gone quite wrong. In sports, that’s included attributing a quote to Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy that Gundy did not say (about driving drunk) and missing the point of jokes about LeBron James and Bronny James to conclude LeBron had an affair with his wife. And, on Wednesday, Grok had another massive fail, taking the 28-28 score after the first quarter of the U.S. men’s basketball national team’s pre-Olympics clash with Serbia as the final. Rob Perez pointed that out:
wow this must have been a great game.
thanks for the heads up, grok. pic.twitter.com/x9SQpLZ0zX— Rob Perez (@WorldWideWob) July 17, 2024
The U.S. wound up winning this 105-79, with Curry scoring 24 points.
Compared to those past failures with Gundy and James, this is relatively mild by comparison. The false quote with Gundy might be legally actionable, especially around such a sensitive subject as driving under the influence. The James misstep was mostly a funny error, but it did still portray him in quite a negative light (although most humans, unlike the AI, probably realized this wasn’t the truth around that story). By contrast, getting the score of a game wrong isn’t as problematic, and this was enough of an absurdly low score that most likely knew it wasn’t accurate.
But this is yet another sign that AI has a long way to go in the accuracy of its results. And we’ve certainly seen that with a lot of attempts to use AI in sports, not just with Grok. Despite that, though, people keep trying to make it happen. Maybe some day they’ll get to a point where it doesn’t just spit out inaccurate information.
[Rob Perez on X/Twitter]
About Andrew Bucholtz
Andrew Bucholtz has been covering sports media for Awful Announcing since 2012. He is also a staff writer for The Comeback. His previous work includes time at Yahoo! Sports Canada and Black Press.