AI can now answer your golf rules questions — with accuracy and authority
In the Stone Age era of 2022, USGA rules expert Craig Winter was sitting in the living room of his home in Washington State with his wife’s friend. An acquaintance was playing on his computer with a new whiz-bang program called ChatGPT that allowed non-coding users to communicate with artificial intelligence through a simple text chat box.
When Winter finally convinces his wife’s friend to let Winter ask the super-bot a question, the story comes as no surprise: The Rules of Golf, specifically a question about the ease of the cart path. There went the question and out came the answer, no less than the USGA’s executive director of the rules of golf and the state of the amateur judging its validity.
“I was really surprised at how good the response was,” Winter recalled in a call with reporters on Tuesday.
After further exploration through Chat, Winter’s wheels began to turn. So are his colleagues. Could the USGA, behind its expertise in the rules area, team up with a tech-solutions company to build an AI rules engine that was better than any other provider could build?
The agency analyzed proposals from several potential partners before settling on one of its corporate partners — professional services firm Deloitte — that, Winter said, “showed us that it might have been more than we had on our plate.”
This was in April 2023.
On Wednesday, the USGA announced the fruits of that collaboration: the launch of the Rules AI testing section, a tool that will live in the GHIN app and, the USGA said, provide golfers with an “accurate, streamlined way” to find answers to their rules questions.
Simply punch in your prompting – how are yellow stakes different from red stakes; what is the penalty for carrying 15 clubs; what to do if a squirrel swipes your ball, etc. — and the app will deliver how-to guidance in the authoritative language gathered from the Rules of Golf, Decisions on the Rules of Golf and a series of rules questions answered by the USGA daily via phone, email and the rules app (more than 20,000 such questions are fielded each year). All in all, a great resource for rules knowledge on which Rules AI has trained itself.
Currently, the app is only available in beta mode to a hand-picked group of USGA member clubs, but the organization has plans to expand that test group to as many as 80,000 or 90,000 member clubs in the New York metropolitan area later this month. The app will be available to all GHIN members in the spring of next year.
If you know anything about the USGA, you probably know that they administer the rules with the diligence of an explosive physicist handling Plutonium-239. Every word is considered, every correction and amendment is painful. Therefore, it may come as a surprise that the USGA has entrusted the instructions of the game to a technology that is incredibly powerful and prone to misinformation, if not outright manipulation.
That’s where it comes from the last two years.
“Our approach from the beginning is that we need to provide accurate answers,” said Anthony Santora, the USGA’s executive director of IT, who joined Tuesday’s call with Winter. “There is a lot of misinformation on the Internet.” Santora added that any possibility of AI Laws providing bad intel is “non-negotiable. So, for us, we’ve been taking this guarded approach to everything.”
At first, that meant training the engine on the 25 main rules in the rulebook, and many subsections of those rules. Then came the sober education in the form of 35,000 questions and answers from the USGA rules database. That was followed by feeding real-time rules questions that golfers emailed to the USGA — the USGA rules department reviews how well the bot answered them. This was an important step in improving the intelligence of the application. Since the USGA rules have flagged AI rules that provide inaccurate or incomplete answers, it has been able to continuously train them so they don’t make the same mistake again. This rule will also make it challenging for a competitor to come in and create an equally reliable rule tool.
“We are able to continue to make this better and we are able to teach you because we are holding hands, we are watching, we are looking at the questions coming in, we are also seeing the answers coming out,” said Santora.
Week by week and month by month, the app got smarter and more sophisticated.
“I spent a lot of time dreaming that this could actually work,” Winter said, “but I didn’t get to that point until we were about 16, 18 months in.”
All possible questions rise to the subject of 500 different laws — that is, “out of bounds,” “exempt from carriageway,” etc. “When a question comes, it will eventually come to a topic that is very similar to what this person is asking,” said Winter. “So all of that logic is available so that the system can use this closed-loop information to get the answer.”
That doesn’t mean AI Rules are perfect. No machine, no matter how well trained, can know everything, especially when it comes to the Rules of Golf, where unprecedented situations can seem out of the air. If the app finds a question it doesn’t feel is appropriate to answer (and no doubt, since the app is widely available, an army of speedy typos will be happy to try to stop the bot), it’s wired to refer users to the USGA for further advice.
Complex questions can take the Rules AI 10 seconds or more to answer but frequently asked questions will have what the USGA calls “golden answers” the app will deliver almost instantly.
Winter stressed that AI Rules should not be used to supersede the professional position or decisions of tournament committees or clubs; more a reference that allows players easy and quick access to the rules guide, which will likely also reduce the volume of rules questions on USGA courses in the old fashioned way.
“We’re not trying to put a law enforcement officer in the golfers’ pockets,” Winter said. “This is about elevating the expertise of our rules staff, our rules experts, to golf around the world.”
