Last week while the mainstream news was discussing the dangers of Artificial Intelligence to society a new sportscaster slipped on to You Tube with little fanfare. He commented on the New Mexico Open alongside Ryan Burr and Notah Begay III.

Hello World from the first Al generated golf commentator, Duff Foreman.

The Al has been created by Copher Hole Production, a company that develops Al powered personalities. Neither the wooden commentary (what is minus five under) nor the weird Scottish accent it occasionally lapsed into, was impressive.

This reminds us that while Al is being developed very fast, some of it is not that good.

I felt lazy this week and asked ChatGPT for a list of the scores of the Solheim Cup singles matches. Within 5 seconds it came back with the list. I looked at it and thought “Seriously, you’ve just told me that Mimi Rhodes beat Nelly Korda on Sunday?”

So I wrote a prompt saying “This is not correct. World Number 1 player Nelly Korda won her match against Mimi Rhodes. Please check the scores again”.

In ten seconds this time I got the correct scores. But I only knew they were correct because I checked each one against the Official Solheim Cup website and two social media outlets. All taking time. The reply had been prefaced with this comment from the AI:

“I apologize. I got three scores wrong. Thank you for correcting me.”

Three scores wrong?! You have one job.

If I had not spotted the mistake and just relied on the Al to do the work for me and used it – it would have made my content inaccurate. Therefore it cannot totally be trusted to provide accurate facts. This is the second time in two weeks I’ve caught ChatGPT out giving inaccurate facts. As this is the Al that most people use for general knowledge it shows that the progress of training Al is not as advanced as some of the panic mongers in the media are saying. I also find its “pat on the head’ tone rather patronising at times. CoPilot usually works for me and Claude is excellent for more complex work, but none of them are fail proof.