Men’s Health repeats false Google AI claim on Luka Dončić
Men’s Health magazine appears to have used inaccurate information from an AI-generated Google summary in an article on basketball player Luka Dončić.
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Men’s Health magazine appears to have used inaccurate information from an AI-generated Google summary in an article on basketball player Luka Dončić.
The article claimed that Dončić recorded a 42-inch vertical leap at the 2018 NBA Scouting Combine but it was debunked as false as soon as the story went online.
The 26-year-old Slovenian basketball star, who now plays for the Los Angeles Lakers, did not hit the mark at the Combine that year and did not even participate in the event.
Nick Angstadt, host of Locked on Mavericks podcast, pointed out that the factoid was likely taken from an AI summary in Google search, which falsely claimed the same thing.
Google’s AI Overview summary said that Dončić’s vertical leap was “officially measured at 42 inches during the 2018 NBA Scouting Combine,” according to a screenshot shared by Angstadt on social media platform X.
According to Angstadt, the AI summary likely confused Dončić with Minnesota Timberwolves guard Donte DiVincenzo, who did in fact record a 42-inch vertical leap at the 2018 NBA Combine.
That men's health article on Luka Doncic claims he had a 42-inch vertical at the combine... but Luka didn't participate in the combine
undefined Nick Angstadt (@NickVanExit) July 28, 2025
It seems like the author just got that from the Google AI summary, which mistakes Donte Divincenzo's vertical leap number for Luka's. pic.twitter.com/2vLmGI2YvY
Both the AI summary and the Men’s Health article have been amended since, with the magazine acknowledging that the statement was incorrect. Cybernews has reached out to Hearst, which owns the publication, for comment.
The information provided by Google AI was apparently published without fact-checking it first, distracting from an otherwise well-written and insightful feature on Dončić.
Our digital cover star, Luka Doncic, ready to take his game (and the Lakers) to new levels of dominance. And this summer shred has been years in the making.https://t.co/aB19DY7rrL pic.twitter.com/bjVsf1ampI
undefined Men's Health Mag (@MensHealthMag) July 28, 2025
“It’s just the new version of ‘don’t trust Wikipedia’ when I was a kid in school,” Angstadt said in a follow-up post on X, adding that “you have to fact-check it and its sources.”
According to a recent study by the Pew Research Center, Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in search results.
Researchers found that only 8% of visits where users encountered an AI summary resulted in clicks on traditional search result links. Users also rarely clicked on links to the sources cited in the summary itself, accounting for only 1% of total visits.
While this is troubling news for publishers, who are sounding the alarm over declining traffic, it also raises concerns about how easy misinformation could spread through AI chatbots.
