ROSEMARY ABBOTT | Sport
SO FAKE
An 11-year-old boy has reportedly dismissed one of rugby’s most legendary figures as “clearly fake” and “AI” after stumbling across highlight footage of Jonah Lomu on YouTube.
Jaxon Webb, a Year 7 student who describes himself as “pretty onto it with AI stuff,” said the clips looked “way too unrealistic to be real human gameplay.”
“I mean, I’ve seen some big runs in rugby in Super Rugby” said Webb, pausing mid-scroll. “But there’s no way someone that size is running that fast and just bowling people over like NPCs. That’s AI, 100%.”
Webb’s skepticism peaked after viewing footage from the 1995 Rugby World Cup, where Lomu famously steamrolled England defender Mike Catt.
“There’s literally a clip where he just runs straight over this dude,” Webb said. “Like, fully flattens him. No sidestep, no nothing. Just deletes him. That doesn’t happen in real life. That’s generated content.”
Jaxon’s mother, Karen Webb, said she wasn’t surprised by her son’s conclusion, admitting she may have contributed to his confusion after repeatedly warning him about the dangers of the internet.
“I always tell him, ‘Don’t believe everything you see online, there’s AI everywhere now,’” she explained. “I didn’t think he’d apply that logic to actual history, but here we are.”
Despite her attempts to clarify that Lomu was, in fact, a real person who terrorised defences for the All Blacks in the 90s and early 2000s, Jaxon remains unconvinced.
“If he was real, why haven’t we seen anyone like him since?” he argued. “Like, where are the other Jonahs? You can’t just have one guy built like that. It doesn’t add up.”
Meanwhile, historians are reportedly bracing for further claims that the All Blacks’ dominance in the 90s was “scripted,” and that VHS tapes may soon be dismissed as “early deepfakes.”
At the time of publication, Jaxon had moved on to watching clips of Christian Cullen, but confirmed he was “keeping an eye out for glitches.”
More to come.
