The AI tennis coach from one prompt isn’t genius. It’s the illusion of competence - and it’s contagious. 🎾
Here’s the unsexy truth: most chatbots can’t watch video. They read text and peek at images - single frames, not motion. So your “coach” is either guessing from one screenshot, or someone is quietly slicing the clip into frames and shoving them in.
My AI research agent pulled the docs and pricing across vendors, and the pattern is boring. Claude handles images and PDFs, not native MP4s. Gemini can take video, but even there you fight timing, occlusion, and subtle technique. Big context window doesn’t equal seeing. It just means the model can recite more of what it doesn’t fully understand.
And costs? Frame slicing at about 30 FPS turns a 60 second rally into roughly 1,800 images. Every one eats tokens. That’s real money per minute for confident prose about footwork the model never actually saw in motion. You pay more to be wrong, but with nicer sentences.
What would real look like? You’d use actual computer vision - pose estimation, player tracking, ball trajectory, timing - and a rules layer that knows tennis. Or a truly video-native model with careful sampling and evaluation. Then you’d validate with a coach. Shiny demo is not a coach. Shiny demo is a trailer.
The rot is the vibe. A smooth LLM report feels like truth. Influencers post reels, audiences comment “guide” to get the prompt, and thousands copy-paste a toy that can’t measure a hip angle or contact point.
Quick sniff test before you clap: can it take raw video natively, or is it doing frame confetti? Do you see numbers on angles, tempo, ball speed - or just vibes? Is there a per-clip cost and repeatable results on new footage? Any coach sign-off, or only hype?
Takeaway: AI isn’t a magic pill. It’s a power tool. If you don’t know the sport, it will help you produce prettier nonsense, faster and pricier. Use it where it’s strong, admit where it’s blind, and stop selling trailers as films. 🔧
What “AI coach” demo looked legit to you until you checked the receipts? Drop it below and I’ll tear it down.