Runners make their way up 4th Avenue in Brooklyn during the New York City marathon on November 05, 2023 in New York City.

Having just completed an Ironman in Barcelona – a swimming, cycling, and running endurance challenge that took over 13 hours to complete – Jeffrey Williams was baffled by Strava’s newly-introduced “Athlete Intelligence” feature on his favorite workout tracking app.

At the end of the final segment, a 26.2 mile marathon that took him over 5.5 hours to finish, Athlete Intelligence – which uses AI to take those stats and summarize them into a few sentences – told him it was an “impressive long run,” and noted that his “training is clearly paying off.”

“They’re giving you this chipper ChatGPT – you just roll your eyes,” Williams told Forbes. He finds the feature slightly insulting.

“It has no context. It couldn’t differentiate a marathon where I had a profound emotional experience. I really did go to a [mental] place that I did not expect to. It can’t tell the difference between that and a Tuesday evening run.”

Strava users are notorious for obsessively pouring over their own stats – how many minutes per mile on a run, or how many miles per hour during a bike ride. Many follow their friends’ efforts and offer encouragement through the app’s “kudos” thumbs-up feature. But these AI-generated paragraphs, which were rolled out on October 3 to paying subscribers, are often generic or repetitive at best and unintentionally ludicrous at worst, many users say. And they rarely provide the insights users crave........

© Forbes