SHINNECOCK HILLS, N.Y. — Tens of thousands of golf fans have come to eastern Long Island this weekend to watch the world’s best golfers battle stiff Atlantic winds and winding fairways at the 126th U.S. Open at the Shinnecock Hills Golf Club.

While golf’s traditions have changed little since the tournament’s inception in the late 1800s, the AI boom has given rise to a new generation of tools to help players understand the game’s rules and fans enjoy major tournaments.

To help players navigate golf’s rules and receive quick, clear advice, the sport’s governing body in the U.S. and organizer of the U.S. Open, the U.S. Golf Association, recently launched a chatbot-like tool called Rules AI.

“Rules AI is about meeting golfers where they are and giving them access to answers that are as good or better than our own experts,” said Craig Winter, the USGA’s senior director for the rules of golf, in an email to NBC News. “The USGA has a deep respect for golf’s tradition, but that shouldn’t prevent us from improving how people experience playing the game.”

The USGA has established 24 foundational rules that cover everything from equipment requirements to penalties players should face if they hit their ball into a sandy bunker.

Yet interpreting those rules can be almost as challenging as trying to whack the ball toward the flagstick. What should a player do if their ball comes to a halt on a paved (and unplayable) road? What happens if a golf ball ricochets off an alligator’s head into a pond?

Rules AI debuted in a pilot phase in late May, allowing players at certain golf clubs to experiment with the technology via one of the USGA’s mobile apps. For example, users can type in a question about whether they are allowed to move a ball out of a patch of dirt due to construction or how many clubs they are allowed to carry in their bag, receiving a written answer moments later.

To give fans visiting this year’s U.S. Open some hands-on experience with the new service, organizers installed interactive, 7-foot-tall screens in a pavilion alongside the third hole. The setup, which shows an AI-generated rules official, was staffed by employees of the consulting firm Deloitte, which helped the USGA build the system.

After considering a visitor’s question for a few seconds, the AI avatar gave a concise ruling, with specific citations to the USGA rulebook. The avatar complimented NBC News several times for asking “creative” questions, such as whether a beer can could be used to replace a tee.

“There are definitely situations on the course where I would use that,” said Joe Couhig, who was there to support a friend playing in the tournament, Vaughn Harber. Couhig plays on the golf team at Lewis University in Illinois and said he wished he had a dedicated USGA expert to help settle difficult rulings. “That tool could help take into account the entire situation for your specific shot, because a lot of the USGA rules are just written in a very general way,” he said.

Rules AI’s landing page features a disclaimer that the system should not be used as a substitute for a human official’s ruling and notes that generative AI technology is not foolproof.

For years, the USGA has operated phone and email services to help answer golfers’ trickiest rules questions. Rules AI was designed using over 25,000 real questions from those interactions, learning how human USGA experts have approached knotty rulings.

Anthony Santora, the USGA’s managing director for IT and the leader of the team that developed Rules AI, emphasized the importance of this human expertise.

“With generative AI, the data you use is what sets you apart,” he said. “Those 25,000 question-and-answer pairs, they’re our magic, our superpower. We’re not pulling from the open internet.”

Santora said his team also focused on making sure that Rules AI answers only golf-related questions and includes safeguards to prevent inappropriate responses or the sharing of sensitive information. The rollout has gone well so far, he added.

“Our hope is that one day, we’ll be a one-stop shop for any golf question,” Santora said.

The USGA hopes to roll out Rules AI nationwide by spring 2027. Because the technology is still new, many fans strolling the sunny course said they were unaware of it.

“I’ve never heard of any sort of AI rules chatbot, nope,” said Bruin Richardson, who was visiting for the day from New York City. “But it sounds interesting.”

As one of the four major golf championships alongside the British Open, the Masters and the PGA Championship, the U.S. Open and its sister tournament for women are the crown jewels of the USGA. The USGA comprises 55 local golf associations around the country and, along with golf’s governing body in the United Kingdom, establishes the core rules of the sport.

The USGA has embraced automation for years in other domains. It can now automatically track the arc of players’ shots using radar guns, clip and upload highlights to its website in real time and provide text descriptions of a player’s every move.

“I’ve worked in other sports on the production side, and golf is unlike anything else,” said Dave Giancola, the USGA’s senior director of global media. “We have 30,000 shots over 72 holes from 156 players. We could never staff enough people to interpret, interpolate and put that data into a format that’s digestible to not only the avid golf fan but a general sports fan.”

Giancola said AI now gives his team added flexibility to ingest that data, splice it together with TV footage coming in from the telecast’s fleet of cameras mounted atop drones, towers and cranes, and then create products that improve fans’ viewing experience on the course and at home.

Just a few weeks ago, the USGA unveiled another AI-powered offering, RangeCast, at the U.S. Women’s Open, allowing fans to see and analyze players’ warmup shots on the driving range with full ball-flight data.

RangeCast joins ShotCast, which debuted last year and provides shot-by-shot graphic visualizations for fans visiting the USGA’s website or mobile app. ShotCast also lets users view AI-generated text summaries of each shot, helping fans piece together a narrative for each hole.

Ned Horton, who was visiting for the day with Couhig, said he had already found ShotCast very useful. “I couldn’t see a player’s actual shot from where I was standing on one hole,” he told NBC News. “ShotCast made it easier to understand the situation and the player’s different options.”

This year, the USGA’s website and app also introduced broader AI-generated summaries that can compare a player’s round to the rest of the field, dynamically updating as other players finish and the leaderboard shifts.

But some of the thousands of spectators roaming through sandy paths and knee-high grass were less bullish on AI’s role at the tournament and in golf in general.

“Golf is an escape from life’s distractions,” one fan told NBC News. “I want to live my life in the moment, and I left my phone at home today to get away from all of that noise.”

For his part, the USGA’s Giancola said he envisions a more interactive future for the tournament, perhaps embracing technology like AI-enabled glasses to help fans track players’ shots against the golf ball-colored afternoon sky.

It’s all part of the USGA’s mission to make the sport more accessible to a new generation of fans, he said.

“I’m personally really excited, as a fan of golf, of technology and of the U.S. Open, to see what we can do,” Giancola said. “The sky’s the limit for these championships.”