Caitlin Clark’s Foes Cry “Foul”

Claim the hoop star’s use of AI is unfair

Controversy has erupted over basketball superstar Caitlin Clark’s alleged use of AI software. Opposing players both in the NCAA and WNBA have begun complaining that the record-breaking, six-foot guard from Iowa has been using artificial intelligence (AI) software to gain an unfair advantage on the court. Many describe her use of AI as “performance enhancing,” even likening it to the use of performance-enhancing-drugs (PEDs) which are forbidden in college and professional basketball.

“Hey, no one can do the super-human things she does on court without cheating,” griped one opponent, formerly of the Connecticut Huskies, the team that Iowa beat in the 2024 Women’s Final Four. “A shooting percentage of nearly 40 percent beyond 25 feet is impossible without some sort of performance enhancement.”

Is Caitlin Clark using AI to score? Only her computer knows.

Word has spread in basketball circles that Clark had hired an AI specialist quite some time ago and that the AI software is regularly “trained” using videos of all of Clark’s previous games. That allows her, the story goes, to predict almost to the millimeter where opposing players will be positioned when she shoots. She is also rumored to be using sophisticated AI software, reputedly the equivalent of a theoretical ChatGPT 29, to fine tune the mechanics of her shooting posture right down to a tolerance of one micrometer (one-millionth of a meter).

“They’re pure bullshit,” Clark says when told of these complaints. “I have worked my butt off for years and my success is the result of hard work. Even if I were using AI—and I’m not going to confirm or deny rumors circulated by crybabies—it would be perfectly legal. Good planning is not anything like using PEDs.”

Basketball officials agree. There is and will be, they assured me, nothing in the sport’s rules prohibiting the use, off court, of performance-enhancing software (PES).

That, though, doesn’t seem to be enough to silence the critics. “For God’s sake,” one griped in desperation, “Even her first name has “AI” in it!” They then pointed out, as further evidence that “the fix is in,” recent rumors that Elon Musk has purchased a hefty stake in the Indiana Fever, Clark’s new WNBA team, from real estate developer Herb Simon.

Note: As we went to press, several of the critics quoted here found that their accounts on X, formerly Twitter, had been permanently blocked, without advance notice, by the social network.