NCAA athlete claims she was scolded by AI over prompt about trans players

An NCAA athlete has claimed she was scolded by ChatGPT when she asked the bot to shorten her tweet advocating against allowing trans women in women’s sports.

“I was trying to explain [in the tweet] that I’m an NCAA athlete, and that it’s important to champion the voice of female athletes and to stand up against this ideological war that’s going on that’s putting women in danger and taking away the opportunities for scholarships,” Macy Petty, a volleyball player at Lee University, told Fox News Digital this week.

Petty said she is inexperienced with ChatGPT, but had seen an Instagram reel touting its importance as the next high-tech frontier.

“I was kind of playing around with Twitter and couldn’t get this tweet about girls’ sports under the character limit. So I was like, ‘You know what, I’ll try it. I’ll do it once and see what happens.’ So I just kind of copy and pasted what I had wanted to say and said [to the bot] ‘get this under the Twitter character limit,’” she explained.

According to a video Petty shared on Instagram, the bot responded to the request with a lengthy message reminding her “it’s important to emphasize inclusivity and equality in sports rather than promoting exclusion based on gender.”

“Sports should be accessible and welcoming for all individuals, regardless of gender,” the bot allegedly told Petty.

The message also offered a revised version of Petty words, which the athlete did not share in her post.

“Are you kidding me?” Petty asks the camera in her video.

“AI is being weaponized into some kind of political tool used to hide the truth.”

In her conversation with Fox New Digital, Petty speculated that her use of the phrases “robbing girls of their chance to play” and “male inclusion” triggered the bot.

When Fox News entered their own message using similar phrases, the bot crafted a tweet that read “male inclusion in girls sports denies girls their opportunity to play #FairPlay,” the outlet said.

“We see this bias all over the place. We’ve seen it on Twitter…we see it on Instagram and every other media. It’s the nature of big tech right now,” Petty lamented.

“Honestly, I wish they were at least honest about it. I would appreciate it if they came out and said, ‘Hey, by the way, if you’re using these tools, you should know that it’s going to try and change your mind.

“Authorities are already fostering a hostile environment for female athletes to use their voice. We know we have to stand up to giants, I just didn’t know AI was one of them.”

Petty, of Rock Hill, SC, is a vocal member of the subset of female athletes lashing out against the inclusion of trans women – including University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas – in women’s sports.

She is also an ambassador for Young Women for America, a conservative Christian group that describes itself as a “movement dedicated to impacting the culture for Christ through education and public policy,”

In a tweet celebrating Women’s Sports Week earlier this month, Petty wrote “girls sports for girls only.”

She has also referred to trans women athletes as male or as a “trans-identifying boy athlete.”

In February, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitted that ChatGPT had bias issues, but said the company was working on making the platform more “neutral.”

“We know that ChatGPT has shortcomings around bias, and are working to improve it,” Altman tweeted.

“We are working to improve the default settings to be more neutral, and also to empower users to get our systems to behave in accordance with their individual preferences within broad bounds. This is harder than it sounds and will take us some time to get right.”