Anyone else notice how AI (artificial intelligence) has been shoved into our everyday lives over the course of 2025?

It feels like it started around the Super Bowl, as every other commercial that night was touting some new AI program.

It was suddenly forced into our search engines via Google and Facebook and Instagram. Even your most technologically illiterate relative started talking about ChatGPT and a future for all of us that will be driven by AI.

Here’s the thing about AI, you can’t always trust the information it is feeding you.

Let me give you a specific example from my life.

I was writing about high school baseball earlier this year and I wanted to make sure the player I was mentioning, Warren Wallace, was a senior at Bogue Chitto.

Trying to make sure that I had the correct grade listed by his name, I Googled “Warren Wallace, Senior, Bogue Chitto.”

Google had recently started spitting out AI info at the top of the normally listed search results.

Here is what AI had to say about Warren Wallace:

“Warren Wallace is a former senior linebacker for Bogue Chitto High School, known for his strong performance in his final season, leading the team with 121 tackles and earning Region 7-2A Defensive MVP.”

That’s all true. Warren did have the best season of his career as a senior and did earn that honor, as the AI had culled that information from an article that I wrote about him following football season.

The next part is where things went off the rails.

“He also served as a full-time bus driver, U.S. History teacher, head tennis coach, and Lead Teacher at Bogue Chitto before being named assistant principal.”

Folks, AI might be the future, but it’s got a lot of learning left to do before it’s able to sort out the Wallace Family Tree in the village of Bogue Chitto.

I instantly knew that the person that was being referred to now by the AI generator was current Bogue Chitto assistant principal Chase Wallace.

Warren and Chase are cousins down the line, but they’re obviously different people.

The AI program that got the facts right about Warren by gleaning an article about him, also found an article about Chase when he was promoted to his current post. It didn’t notice the difference in their first names, just their same last names.

 It doesn’t feel like AI is making us smarter, it feels like the opposite.

There are more places than ever for consumers to take in false information and then spew it back out into the world as fact and it feels like AI is only going to exacerbate that problem.

It’ll be a long time before AI is able to explain the branches of the Wallace family tree that flow out of Bogue Chitto, and for that I’m thankful.

I don’t want the machines to be too smart as watching Terminator 2 in my teenage years made me wary of that happening.

It’s not just us normal, everyday people that AI is lying about.

There were headlines this week about an AI-generated article that was being spread in regard to the funeral of Jacklyn Bezos, the mother of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Google-based AI was pushing a story that rapper Eminem performed a song at the funeral.

Which actually sounds like a fun time to me. Angela, when they wheel me out, y’all play Lose Yourself by Marshall Mathers.

Eminem wasn’t there for the Bezos burial. Neither was Elon Musk, who appeared to be comforting Bezos in an AI-generated picture from the internet that’s been spread on social media.

Don’t even get me started on the people that fall for outlandishly fake images created by AI.

Somebody tell Aunt Brenda that the picture of the president and the pope having an arm-wrestling match is fake and she needs to stop sharing it all over Facebook, talking about how jacked Trump looks.

That’s about all I’ve found useful for AI thus far, creating goofy art with it.

For the first time in the history of their rivalry, Lincoln County schools Loyd Star and Bogue Chitto are playing a volleyball match against each other this week.

The football rivalry between the schools is called The Possum Bowl.

For fun, I asked ChatGPT to make me an image of possums playing volleyball with one side wearing red jerseys that say Loyd Star and the other team wearing navy jerseys that say Bogue Chitto.

It quickly spit something out that was technically what I had asked for, but both teams were on the same side of the net.

My buddy Adam has his own sports website based in Northeast Mississippi called goresports.net. Check it out and you’ll notice he does fun stuff with AI-generated art almost daily.

I asked him to use a different program to generate a picture of possums playing volleyball and he got something better than my version.

He said using ChatGPT to write the prompt aka the question helps get better results.

Using a machine to figure out how to talk to a machine does make sense when you ponder it.

Let me take a quick turn to being more serious about this topic for a moment.

I’ve spent the last 20 years interacting with college, high school, and junior high students during my time as an educator.

There are always going to be kids who are more introverted, it’s just how some are wired. When you and I were growing up, some of those kids kept diaries or journals that they filled with their thoughts and observations.

Today, there are more kids every day who express those deep thoughts to the different AI chatbots. Unlike a diary, the chatbot talks back and does so in a way that feels human.

Search the name Adam Raine and read about his story and how his parents say chatting with AI affected his life.

We can’t live in fear, seeking the devil behind every blade of grass, but we as parents must be vigilant in making sure our kids don’t dive too deep into new and emerging technologies without guidance.

That’s what I’m most worried about when it comes to AI, not the fear of it taking my job.

And no matter how smart it gets and how much it improves, I doubt it’ll ever be able to get a handle on the ways that all the Wallaces are related in Bogue Chitto.

Every Tuesday, Cliff Furr tells a story that’s focused on something positive, outside of athletics. Have a tip for a good story, email him at cliff@yallsportsms.com.