Yesterday, I spent two hours helping students at my alma mater write and improve their resumes. At the concluding debrief, one fellow said that he had shown his students how to use AI to write their resumes. That scares me. The director of the program mentioned a low-level university position they had recently advertised for a graduate teaching assistant. She received over 50 cover letters that were nearly identical and had been generated from AI. That scares me. Four days ago, Cathy Wood, from the ARK Innovation Fund, claimed on a CNBC interview that auto piloted cars are 40% safer than human driven and that the future goal was to replace humans with AI driven cars for safety measures. That scares me.
Try this short experiment. Go to https://bing.com in your Microsoft Edge browser and type in “How do I fix my slice?” The site is running Microsoft’s latest generative AI model. The model attempts to regurgitate data that it learns from similar searches and presents it as a curated list. There’s no indication that this electronic blather is any better than the rest of the information on the Internet, nor does it have anything on taking a lesson from a human golf professional.
When I used to give golf lessons, there were no cellphones, there was no AI, there was no internet. Our main competition was bad advice. We had a saying, “Amateurs teach amateurs to play like amateurs,” and it implied that we were always trying to undo well-intentioned advice that our students had received from non-qualified sources. I wonder what today’s golf professionals feel like when they teach.
I no longer teach but take golf lessons. The last few I took hadn’t seemed much different from when I was giving them, although my instructor was able to video my swing on his phone and show me pictures of professionals in the positions he wanted to get me in. The source of the free advice today’s professionals are trying to undo may have changed, but the nature of the pedagogy has not.
Thankfully, the answer is “no.” AI is not going to impact golf anytime soon. What do you think?
Play well.
All About Golf 