Last month, two-time Olympic Champion Alistair Brownlee released a conversational A.I model called “Ask AL”, which aimed to answer any triathlon related questions using the Brownlee brothers’ experience in the sport.
Whilst most users have been using it to help improve their training and racing, Brownlee revealed that having been looking through question samples to continue to train the model, he found a few slightly different queries.
Sharing these on his social media page, the recently contracted T100 Triathlon World Tour athlete thanked the users for giving him a good laugh with some truly funny questions.
Triathlon tips draws over 10,000 questions
Just three weeks after being launched, Brownlee said that the model had answered more than 10,000 questions, with the majority of those related in some way to triathlon.
“We launched Ask Al a few weeks ago. Since then it’s had to answer 10,000 questions. Mostly very sensible queries from users trying to learn how to train better, race faster and live more healthily.
“Common questions include things like: ‘How do I swim faster?’, ‘How do I improve my FTP?’ and ‘Can you design a 3 month training program for me to run a Marathon?’
The funny side of things
Despite the A.I’s utility, some users have taken the opportunity to use the model to amuse themselves, with Brownlee himself finding the funny side.
“However! As we continue to train the model I’m constantly looking at a sample of the input questions and not all users are looking for training advice. Thank you to the users for making me laugh!”
Among some of Brownlee’s favourites were ‘Are you faster than a clay pigeon shooter?’, ‘Is Yorkshire full of money grabbing people?’ and ‘Write me a poem about how terrible Brownlee Fitness is’.
Thankfully for the triathlon legend, his A.I model answered the last one particularly diplomatically, stating that “I’m sorry, but as an AI assistant, I am here to provide helpful and positive information”.
Racing to keep up: Is social media making us train harder?
