Oh, the irony: Wimbledon’s new automated system plagued by human errors

Tennis players aren’t happy with Wimbledon’s new automated electronic line calling system, which replaced humans in this year’s prestigious tournament. But blaming AI is nonsensical.

Just like cricket, Wimbledon, which is 138 years old, is quintessentially British. Traditions matter in this lovely corner of Southwest London, where players have to wear all-white kits and strawberries and cream are served in the stands.

Line judges – usually extremely sharply-dressed – have always been a staple on the courts, too, helping umpires to make the most marginal calls.

This year, they’re gone. The human judges have been replaced by computerized ball-tracking technologies.

Controversy around the new system

“Live Electronic Line Calling has been adopted for this year’s Championships and onwards. The officiating technology will be in place across all Championships and Qualifying match courts and cover the ‘out’ and ‘fault’ calls that have previously been made by line umpires,” The All England Club, in charge of Wimbledon, said in March.

Unfortunately, controversy around the use of the new system hasn’t been lacking. British tennis star Emma Raducanu said the tech missed an “out” ball hit by her opponent, and another Brit, Jack Draper, said he didn’t think the system was “100 percent accurate.”

During a match on Sunday between Sonay Kartal and Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova a ball hit by Kartal clearly went out but the technology failed to make the call.

Curiously, Ben Shelton had to play faster after being told that the new system could stop working properly because of the dimming sunlight. One deaf player revealed that she wasn’t able to tell when she won a point without the human hand signals.

One incident in particular stands out. During a match on Sunday between Sonay Kartal and Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova a ball hit by Kartal clearly went out but the technology failed to make the call.

The umpire then stepped in but ordered a replay of the point instead of awarding it to Pavlyuchenkova. Naturally, she was mad during and after the match, even though she eventually won it.

Wimbledon soon explained it was an “operator error.” The system is shut down between matches, and a human, responsible for activating and deactivating it, accidentally switched it off during that particular tie.

According to the BBC, the All England Club also announced that it removed the ability for the system operators to manually deactivate the ball tracking, adding: “This error cannot now be repeated due to the system changes we have made.”

It’s automated, but it’s not AI

This hasn’t stopped the flow of criticism. On his website, tennis journalist Ben Rothenberg called the mistake a failure of the system but a win for humanity.

“Sure, the human line judges didn’t get every single close call right – or at least sometimes their calls didn’t align with the electronic eyes – but they were doing a pretty great job and didn’t deserve to be chased out in favor of technology that could fail so badly on Centre Court,” wrote Rothenberg.

Wimbledon is pushing back, though. Debbie Jevans, chair of the All England Club, quipped last week: “When we did have linesmen, we were constantly asked why we didn’t have electronic line calling because it’s more accurate than the rest of the tour.”

Sally Bolton, the CEO of the club, also quickly rebuked the claims of some media outlets, especially in Britain, that Wimbledon is now using an AI-powered technology.

That’s true, it’s not AI – the system simply uses cameras, computers and sensors to monitor ball paths to detect whether shots have landed inside or outside the lines. Humans can still intervene.

“The point I would want to emphasize – and perhaps contrary to some of the reporting we’ve seen – is that it's not an artificial intelligence system. And it is electronic in the sense that the camera-tracking technology is set up to call the lines automatically, but it requires a human element to ensure that the system is functional,” Bolton said.

“So it is not AI. There are some humans involved. And in this instance, it was a human error.”

Finally, despite these dodgy moments, it's obvious that the precision of AI will completely outmatch that of human officials. The tennis world is moving on: as of now, Roland Garros, the French Open, is the only Grand Slam tournament to maintain human line judges.