AI Commentator Joins The New Mexico Open. It Banters Unscripted For Three Days. The Humans Are Still There, Thankfully.
An AI personality named Duff Foreman, built by Gopher Hole Productions in Massachusetts, will join analysts Notah Begay III and Ryan Burr on live broadcast for the New Mexico Open. The AI responds on the fly and unscripted to the human analysts' questions across three days of coverage. Organizers believe this is the first time a professional golf tournament has featured an AI interacting with human hosts in real time.
The underlying concept is conversational latency. Previous AI experiments in golf, including those by The Masters and PGA Tour, produced automated highlights and narration after the fact. Those are canned. This is live, unscripted interaction, which means the system must parse natural human speech, generate contextually relevant responses, and do so fast enough that the broadcast does not feel like a satellite delay. The mechanism is called real-time inference, and it is the difference between a chatbot and a co-host.
Gopher Hole Productions, based in Massachusetts, built Duff Foreman. The AI will appear on the New Mexico Open broadcast alongside analysts Notah Begay III and Ryan Burr.
- Open ChatGPT or any consumer AI assistant and tell it to act as a golf commentator with a specific personality, perhaps enthusiastic and slightly nerdy. Expect the AI to adopt the persona and respond in character.
- Describe a fictional golf shot in detail, such as a 150-yard approach to a green guarded by water, and ask the AI to call the shot as if it were live. You should get a real-time, unscripted commentary response.
- Ask follow-up questions about the shot, the player's strategy, or the course conditions, and notice how the AI maintains context across the conversation. The expected outcome is a sense of how an AI can hold its own in a back-and-forth, which is exactly what Duff Foreman will be doing on live television.