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The goal of professional sports has always been to win. Looking good while doing it? That’s just a bonus for the gawkers and connoisseurs of human form and motion.

In professional tennis, the “beauty factor” has come to focus on one stroke in particular: the one-handed backhand. The vintage stroke, so named because of its reliance on just one hand, is gradually disappearing from the professional game, as coaches, club pros and parents increasingly opt to teach beginners the more effective two-handed backhand.  

That’s because the two-hander is far more suited to the modern game for beginners and professionals alike, experts say. 

And, when it comes to acquiring the technical skills required of a sport like tennis, it’s a case of: teach them while they’re young. Rui Li, associate clinical professor and director of the exercise science program at Northeastern University, says that motor learning and skill acquisition peak during childhood years, which is the best time to pick up a racquet.   

Li examined the kinetics of both backhand strokes. She says that the two-handed backhand engages more large muscle groups — including the core, back, shoulder and triceps — to provide stability. Because the stroke involves multiple muscle groups, requiring “refined motor control and neural coordination,” the two-handed backhand can be more challenging to pick up later in life. 

“It takes longer to develop the automation of the kinetic chain, which involves reflexes and complex motor skill development,” she says. 

Joel Drucker, a leading tennis writer and historian-at-large, says the two-handed backhand is a more effective stroke, given the range of physical demands modern tennis places on players.

And the reason, he says, is simple: two hands are better than one. 

“It’s like chopping wood,” Drucker says. “You have more stability, you have power. Players, when they learn younger, are able to learn a proficient stroke that is incredibly effective the way Chris Evert, Jimmy Connors and Bjorn Borg pioneered starting in the ’70s.” 

Evert, Connors and Borg were early adopters of the now ubiquitous stroke — and the most successful examples before the technique exploded in popularity during the ’80s and ’90s.

For a variety of reasons, the two-handed backhand is advantageous in the modern game, which is characterized by baseline rallies, increased spin and greater pace of shot.

Compared to a one-handed backhand, the two-handed backhand also offers greater maneuverability on the return of serve because, among other things, the non-dominant hand provides that added support, reducing some of the challenges faced by single-handed players, Drucker says. (Players with a one-handed backhand often “chip,” or slice, the return of serve on that wing because of the extreme grip change required to strike the ball flat or with topspin.)

“It [the two-handed backhand] can generate more power, more leverage, more disguise — everything,” Drucker says. 

“You can be more forceful from the baseline with a two-handed backhand, and because of that, those who learn with a two-handed backhand tend to play more from the baseline compared to net rushers,” he says. 

Players who grew up using the one-handed backhand — if they were taught correctly, Drucker says — would have learned also to rely on the backhand slice, a shot designed to slow the pace of a rally by generating backspin, which can throw an opponent off their rhythm. For that reason, those players may be able to slice the ball more effectively compared to their double-handed counterparts, who generally prefer to drive the ball rather than vary spins.  

And, he says, the one-handed backhand, the backhand volley and slice share many of the same technical elements. That can be a boon to beginners who decide to take up the single-hander: the precision and timing required to execute such a complex stroke carry over, to some degree, to other shots.

“The slice backhand technique is almost a sibling of the backhand volley,” he says.

Of course, the one-handed backhand is far from dead: younger generations of players continue to find examples of the stroke in mastered form thanks to social media. And those who manage to break through at the highest level with the old-school technique — like Lorenzo Musetti in recent years — inevitably bring renewed attention to it.

But, as players today strike the ball with more spin and speed than ever, Drucker sees the evolution of the modern game progressing — as it always had — toward the maximization of “leverage, proficiency and power” by all available means. 

“It’s about scalability and sustainability,” Drucker says. “This was as true in the wood racquet era as it is today. That’s the game. It’s about scalability and sustainability. That’s what makes greatness.” 

Warner Bros. Discovery is suing a prominent artificial intelligence image generator for copyright infringement, escalating a high-stakes battle involving the use of movies and TV shows owned by major studios to teach AI systems.

The lawsuit accuses Midjourney, which has millions of registered users, of building its business around the mass theft of content. The company “brazenly dispenses Warner Bros. Discovery’s intellectual property” by letting subscribers produce images and videos of iconic copyrighted characters, alleges the complaint, filed on Thursday in California federal court.

“The heart of what we do is develop stories and characters to entertain our audiences, bringing to life the vision and passion of our creative partners,” said a Warner Bros. Discovery spokesperson in a statement. “Midjourney is blatantly and purposefully infringing copyrighted works, and we filed this suit to protect our content, our partners, and our investments.”

With the lawsuit, Warner Bros. Discovery joins Disney and Universal, which earlier this year teamed up to sue Midjourney. By their thinking, the AI company is a free-rider plagiarizing their movies and TV shows.

In a statement, Disney said it’s “committed to protecting our creators and innovators” and that it’s “pleased to be joined by Warner Bros. Discovery in the fight against Midjourney’s blatant copyright infringement.”

Added NBCUniversal, “Creative artists are the backbone of our industry, and we are committed to protecting their work and our intellectual property.”

For years, AI companies have been training their technology on data scraped across the internet without compensating creators. It’s led to lawsuits from authors, record labels, news organizations, artists and studios, which contend that some AI tools erode demand for their content.

In the lawsuit, Warner Bros. Discovery points to Midjourney generating images of iconic copyrighted characters. At the forefront are heroes who’re at the center of DC Studios’ movies and TV shows, like Superman, Wonder Woman and The Joker; others are Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry and Scooby-Doo characters who’ve become ubiquitous household names; more are Cartoon Network characters, including those from Rick and Morty, who’ve emerged as something of cultural touchstones in recent years.

Midjourney, which has four tiers of paid subscriptions ranging from $10 to $120 per month, returns characters owned by Warners even in response to prompts like “classic comic book superhero battle” that don’t explicitly mention any particular intellectual property, the complaint alleges.

As evidence that Midjourney trained its AI system on its intellectual property, Warner Bros. Discovery attaches dozens of images showing the tool’s outputs compared to stills from its movies and TV shows. When prompted with “Batman, screencap from The Dark Knight,” the service returns an image of Christian Bale’s portrayal of the character featuring the costume’s Kevlar plate design that differentiated it from previous iterations of the hero that appears to be taken from the movie or promotional materials, with few to no alternations made. One of the more convincing examples highlights a 3D-animated Bugs Bunny mirroring his adaptation in Space Jam: A New Legacy.

The lawsuit argues Midjourney’s ability to return copyrighted characters is a “clear draw for subscribers,” diverting consumers away from purchasing Warner Bros. Discovery-approved posters, wall art and prints, among other products that must now compete against the service.

Like OpenAI, the content used to train Midjourney’s technology is a black box, representing an obstacle for some creators who’ve sued AI companies for copyright infringement. Rightsholders have mined public statements from AI company C-suites for clues. In 2022, Midjourney founder David Holz said in an interview that his employees “grab everything they can, they dump it in a huge file, and they kind of set it on fire to train some huge thing.” The specifics of the training process will be subject to discovery.

Warner Bros. Discovery seeks Midjourney’s profits attributable to the alleged infringement or, alternatively, $150,000 per infringed work, which could leave the AI company on the hook for massive damages.

The thrust of the studios’ lawsuits will likely be decided by one question: Are AI companies covered by fair use, the legal doctrine in intellectual property law that allows creators to build upon copyrighted works without a license? On that issue, a court found earlier this year that Amazon-backed Anthropic is on solid legal ground, at least with respect to training.

The technology is “among the most transformative many of us will see in our lifetimes,” wrote U.S. District Judge William Alsup.

Still, the court set the case for trial over allegations that the company illegal downloaded millions of books to create a library that was used for training. Anthropic, which later settled the lawsuit, faced potential damages of hundreds of millions of dollars stemming from the decision that may have laid the groundwork for Warner Bros. Discovery, Disney and Universal to get similar payouts depending on what they unearth in discovery over how Midjourney obtained copies of thousands of films and TV shosws that were repurposed to teach its image generator.

Still on the sidelines in the fight over generative AI: Paramount Skydance, Amazon MGM Studios, Apple Studios, Sony Pictures and Lionsgate. Some have major AI ambitions.